Final Thoughts

Since its initial release in 2002, the .NET Framework has been used in thousands of applications with millions of users. Its success took a while, in part because .NET was launched during the worst IT recession in history, but surveys today suggest that the bulk of enterprise software development is divided more or less evenly between .NET and the Java environment. Competition is a good thing, and both camps continue to produce interesting new ideas.

The .NET Framework is a successful technology

Yet nobody would claim that today's technologies represent the last word in software development. Innovations keep appearing from Microsoft and others. Some of these ideas succeed, while others fail utterly. Yet whatever the fate of individual innovations, moving forward into the unknown space of new technology is guaranteed to remain the mainstay of software. The best is yet to come.

New ideas are the lifeblood of software