Introduction

In July 2000, at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Orlando, FL, Bill Gates delivered his keynote speech. In this speech he discussed the future of application development, and how it will be so closely tied to the Internet that it would be hard to imagine an application that did not use the Internet in some fashion. Gates explained his vision for software as a service; software that can be provided on demand via the Internet using Web services. All of these things revolved around Microsoft's new strategy, something called the .NET Framework.

The .NET Framework is a completely new set of building blocks for application development, with the idea that all programming languages are created equal. In other words, ...

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