Stale .NET- Related Names Microsoft has already changed the names of some .NET-related technologies. To help anyone who may be confused , I have summarized all of the already-obsolete .NET-related technology names that I know of in this section. NGWS Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS) was Microsoft's internal name for the .NET technologies before the marketing people got a hold of it and renamed it to .NET. Microsoft claims that it worked secretly on its .NET strategy for three and a half years before its introduction in the summer of 2000. It was probably known internally as NGWS for most of that time. Several Microsoft insiders wrote books about this technology prior to its introduction (and renaming to .NET), so the term NGWS did leak into the industry press. Some examples of early .NET books that use the name NGWS include Presenting C# by Tony Goodhew and Sams Publishing, 2000, A Preview of Active Server Pages+ by Richard Anderson et al. and Wrox Press, 2000, and A Programmer's Introduction to C# by Eric Gunnerson and APress, 2000. For that reason, I decided to define this acronym so you wouldn't be confused if you saw it. Just remember that NGWS is .NET, and you won't be confused. Note One of the biggest leaks of information during this three-and-a-half-year period was a pair of articles written by Mary Kirtland (one of the COM leads at Microsoft) in the November and December 1997 issues of Microsoft Systems Journal. In those articles, she talked about Microsoft's plans for COM+, which was still in development at that time. She mentioned a universal runtime and other improvements that would make it as easy for Visual C++ programmers to develop COM objects as it is for Visual Basic programmers to develop COM objects. The article also talked about improved meta information that would replace type libraries and that the next version of COM+ would support implementation inheritance. Of course, none of these things came to pass for COM+ 1.0, which turned into a substantially improved version of MTS. Mary spent the next year telling everyone who would listen that the articles were based on initial plans and that they were no longer accurate. It's clear now that she was actually talking about the .NET Framework. The timing of her initial articles supports Microsoft's three-and-a-half-year timeline.
COOL The Component Object Oriented Language (COOL) was Microsoft's internal name for C# prior to its renaming. Just like the term "NGWS," the name COOL leaked into the industry press on a number of occasions. One of the most famous leaks was in 1999 when Microsoft asked the judge in their now famous antitrust lawsuit if it would be in violation of their licensing agreement with Sun Microsystems if Microsoft created its own Java-like language. That set off a flurry of information in the industry press about COOL. At the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC), Developmentor (a famous COM think tank and training company [www.develop.com]) distributed a t-shirt that read: C# is COOL. If you can remember that, you shouldn't be confused by this name. What was previously known as COOL is now called C#. I even noticed that sample programs in the prebeta versions of the .NET Framework SDK contain references to cool in makefiles that are compiling C# code, as shown here from the master.mak makefile include file. #default compiling cool files #note: name.cs and name.exe must match .cs.exe: ADO+ This name was replaced by ADO.NET. ASP+ This name was replaced with ASP.NET. | 
