Sams Teach Yourself Visual Studio® .NET 2003 in 21 Days

Windows of the Past

In the past, millions of applications were developed for Windows-based systems using a variety of development tools and languages. Visual Basic, C++, Delphi, Java, and Access provided a great toolset that enabled you to write applications for Windows. The problem that crept up again and again was how these applications communicated with each other and how they could communicate with data beyond the departmental server. Because each language has its own runtime environment, they all run essentially inside their own box, using their own way to communicate with core system services. There was no way to get outside the box. When a new feature to a language had to be added, it would be bolted somewhere on to the runtime environment ...