I've seen pronunciation guides and all sorts of definitions of .NET as a framework, but no definition or explanation of the actual name of the framework.
Wikipedia doesn't seem to know. This question didn't cover it.
Anybody know? Is it pure marketing-generated nonsense, or does it mean something?
Just a guess, but I think it's supposed to sound like the end of a URL for a website (which is apparently known as a top-level domain). So .NET is kind of like .com, .biz, or .org. Microsoft wanted to make it sound like it's new programming environments were going to be very internet savvy.
from http://looselycoupled.com/glossary/.NET:
"Microsoft's web services architecture, pronounced dot-net. Despite the capital letters, it's not an acronym. .NET is the brand name for a set of proprietary Microsoft frameworks and technologies founded on XML web services standards. Standards compliance means that applications written using .NET should interoperate with those written in rival architectures, such as J2EE, the distributed application infrastructure based on Sun's Java language. However, interoperability is not portability; .NET applications will only run on Microsoft platforms, such as Windows Server or Windows XP."
It doesn't really stand for anything, but it is part of the naming scheme used by Microsoft in early 2000s, out of which (as far as I know), only the .NET Framework, and Visual Studio .NET, survived. It was supposed to be much more expansive - for example, Windows Server 2003 was supposed to be "Windows Server .NET".
There are no clear explanations, but it seems to be related to the marketing campaign which described the new wave of Microsoft tech as "Internet centric". If you saw the early PR materials for .NET Framework, they heavily emphasized Web Services, for example (it was all the craze back in the day, and MS played a large part in defining the WS-* stack). Then also it was said that Microsoft Passport would rule the world as a single-point authentication system.
These days, I guess it's just a brand.
All I can remember from when the framework was first in beta is a ridiculous amount of press regarding the use of web services, and how the new framework by Microsoft was going to make all of that SOAP/web service stuff easier and better. It's a stretch, but maybe that's why. Not the greatest name, anyways.
It's not an acronym.
In the beginning - around 1997 - there was Project Lightning. It was also known as Project 42 because DevDiv (Microsoft's Developer Division) lived (and still lives) in Building 42 on the Redmond Campus. (I've always thought that was an awesome building number for DevDiv with the little hat tip to Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I've always wondered if it was intentional.) Early press announcements referred to it as "Next Generation Windows Services". Eventually Project Lightning was dubbed Microsoft .NET, though some code names have been forever baked into the system.
Marketing was thinking of calling it COM+ 2.0 or the Universal Runtime (URT). Another idea was the COM Object Runtime (COR). Hence mscorlib.dll, which is still the assembly that holds the CLR's main types and is the one assembly that must be loaded in every .NET app domain. (System.dll is often loaded, but need not be. Mscorlib.dll contains the code for System.String, System.Int32, etc. You honestly can't do anything without mscorlib.dll loaded.)
"The .NET Framework is Microsoft's platform for building applications that have visually stunning user experiences, seamless and secure communication, and the ability to model a range of business processes. By providing you with a comprehensive and consistent programming model and a common set of APIs, the .NET Framework helps you to build applications that work the way you want, in the programming language you prefer, across software, services, and devices." http://www.microsoft.com/net/overview.aspx
Many people think that ".NET" is for "Network Services", and they also think that .Net apps will have networking functionality. This is not totally true because .Net is a framework that does a lot more than just networking stuff.
This is a proof of how confusing the name ".Net" can be.
About 10 years ago, I was part of the large team in Redmond working on the set of projects which became ".net". This was during the time the decisions were being made about what to name this work. I can tell you from first-hand experience that ".net" is not an acroynm.
Instead, the James Kovacs blog post that Jim W posted is accurate: ".net" was one of many names that the teams cycled through (and thankfully rejected) before settling on ".net". The name was chosen because it:
So it was intended to mean something, but more so by connotation rather than directly abbreviating or describing something. In other words, the name was only partly marketing nonsense! ;-)
More trivia
I don't remember the exact positioning (it's been 10 years!), but I believe that the name ".net" was supposed cover three basic things:
In practice, only the first meaning stuck with users. The others morphed into other names (e.g. "Windows Server System") or were genericized by the public (e.g. "web services", SOA, etc.). Anyway, that's why you don't see Microsoft products named "<product name here>.NET Server" any more-- Microsoft wisely decided to limit the ".net" name to the things that developers actually thought of as ".net"!
BTW, in addition to being short and easy to spell and say, ".net" as a name also helped with the web services strategy which Microsoft was persuing at the time, which revolved around (and still does) offering software which was also available in the cloud. The idea was that we'd have, for example, Office.com for a hosted UI version, and Office.net for the APIs. The name also was convenient since Microsoft already owned the .net domain-name variants for every microsoft product.
There's a funny T-Shirt (I think Don Box had them made?) which lists all the considered names (e.g. URT, COM+, etc.) with thick red lines drawn through all the names except the last one (".net"). The list goes from the top of the shirt right down the back, like a long list of cancelled Mötley Crüe tour dates, but nerdier!
Speaking of shirts, here's one I just pulled from my closet listing one of the early codenames: "Project 42". (See the blog post linked above for more details on this codename and others.) Note the "hitchhiker's guide-like" graphics-- the geek factor was pretty high in those days!
