July 11, 2000 — Microsoft Unveils .NET, C#, and Visual Studio .NET at PDC

On July 11, 2000, at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft unveiled its new .NET platform, the Visual Studio .NET development environment, and an entirely new programming language, C#. Although the company’s .NET strategy had been announced a few weeks earlier, PDC was the first time developers could get their hands on the new tools and see Microsoft’s vision for the future of software development.

By the late 1990s, building Windows applications had become increasingly complicated. Developers had to work with COM, the Win32 API, MFC, and a growing collection of incompatible technologies. At the same time, Java was gaining momentum by promising that applications could run on different platforms without modification. Microsoft’s answer was a new development platform of its own.

The centerpiece was .NET Framework—a unified runtime with a comprehensive class library and automatic memory management. Alongside it came the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which allowed different programming languages to share the same runtime environment and work together seamlessly.

Microsoft also officially introduced C# at the conference. The language was designed by Anders Hejlsberg, best known for creating Turbo Pascal and Delphi. Built specifically for .NET, C# combined ideas from C++, Java, and Delphi while introducing its own type system, automatic memory management, and tight integration with the CLR.

At the same event, Microsoft unveiled Visual Studio .NET, bringing its development tools together in a single environment, and introduced ASP+, which was soon renamed ASP.NET.

Around six thousand developers attended the conference. They received the first beta versions of .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET, giving them an early look at a platform that would go on to power millions of desktop and enterprise applications over the following decades.

The first production release, .NET Framework 1.0, shipped in February 2002 alongside Visual Studio .NET 2002. C# quickly became one of the world’s most widely used programming languages, while .NET evolved into one of the industry’s leading development platforms. Today, the .NET ecosystem extends far beyond Windows, and C# is used across desktop, web, cloud, mobile, and game development.

Sources

• Microsoft PDC 2000
• Microsoft News Center — Microsoft Delivers First .NET Platform Developer Tools for Building Web Services (July 11, 2000)
• Microsoft .NET Blog (archive)
• Anders Hejlsberg — The .NET Framework and Tools, PDC 2000
• C# Version History