I always wondered why Microsoft chose such a strange, search-engine-unfriendly name for such a great platform. Couldn't they have come up with something better?
Apparently the codename was NGWS:
Microsoft started development on the .NET Framework in the late 1990s originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). [Wikipedia]
Does anyone know why they chose the name .NET?
interNET would be my guess
In the mid\late 90's Microsoft saw the internet as the Future and also felt they where a little late to the game. Thus Explorer being forced on people by being embedded in the OS(Which they are regretting now). Removing competitors such as Java from Windows AND a really over the top name like .NET to indicate there are now a web friendly company....
Since you're not going to look up the answer, neither am I :) But if I remember correctly, Microsoft was trying to play up the connectivity aspect of .Net. They've been trying to get "up to speed" with the whole Internet thing since Active Desktop, and have a history of goofy names and poorly thought out ideas. Not that .Net is a bad technology, I'm not saying that.
I will say, however, that .Net is one of the worst names I've ever come across. It's hard to search for and in no way communicates what the "product" is. If you remember the early days of .Net, there were plenty of articles and interviews and videos of Microsoft big wigs trying to explain what .Net was using big budget buzzwords... it didn't work well and for years people would still wonder what the hell it was. Even MFC was a better name because at least a programmer could recognize the components of the acronym.
The early marketing thrust of .NET was web services. .NET was supposed to make it easy both to write and consume web services. In particular, it was supposed to make it easier to call the web services that Microsoft was going to provide, and that everyone would then use: the ".NET My Services".
Of course, that fell apart very quickly, but the name remained. It was at least better than "COM++" or "ActiveXX".
It's the single stupidest name the marketing team could think of, and that's why they went with it. I can't explain it any other way.
.NET is natural for Microsoft marketing to emphasis on the "Network"-ing aspect of its technologies and reacted to the marketing blitz by Sun Micro System in the late 1990 where the theme was "Network is the computer". The term "Dot-Com" was synonymous with the Internet that time, and "Dot-NET" was a play to that word.
I don't think it is a bad name at all, the problem was that Microsoft named so many products with the ".Net" nomenclature like .NET my services, Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers where the latter had nothing to do with the Internet. It caused so much confusions. Only later Microsoft corrected itself by limiting .NET name to technologies related to Managed Runtime Framework.
I was a dev at Microsoft at the time, and I have no idea whose ass the name .NET was pulled from. Anyone I talked to thought it was a lousy name for all the reasons already enumerated. At least it's pronounceable, unlike NGWS.
it's called .NET so it wouldn’t show up in a Unix directory listing!
net means Network Enabled Technology . and some people say because everything can be accesed with help of DOT operator hence it was called .NET ... some one told me this answer am not sure until what extent is it correct
Most of the person asked this thing that why .net is called .net and what is the significance of . over here? so, the answer is as dotnet is a collection of many languages. here .(dot) show the collection of 70+ languages which is used in visual studio's any version. while net refers to (network Embedded Technology) as we are flexible enough to make any sort of program which might run on network..one more reason is ther if u want to run any asp.net project on the server..will use the iis server which works as an local server to execute the web based program. so, that there is no need to create any other server..specifically for running a web based program...
Can believe the obvious reason isnt already answered?
Microsoft lost their case vs SUN who had developed JAVA. Microsoft wanted to push JAVA further forward and into Microsofts Windows environment, to allow it to run faster and utilize Windows better.
SUN saw the "badness" in another Microsoft only and wanted JAVA to stay true crossplatform. So after Microsoft lost the case, they removed the JAVA-VM from their Internet Explorer and now consumers had to download the client manually if they really wanted JAVA so badly.
In the background Microsoft had gained SO much insights in how JAVA was build and combined with their ideas, they "invented" .NET technology based on Microsoft platform. They also made it OpenSource, so that people could produce "legal copies" on other platforms if they wanted (MONO).
So... why is .NET called .NET ? well, the name "JAVA" was already occupied and the new name had to be very different because of lost case/court trials, eventhough the technologies behaves very similar.
(oooh, now I will probarbly get my head pulled of and placed on a stick somewhere by angry evangelists, so before that, just for your information people, I develop C#.NET solutions myself. Not JAVA, and every example I've seen on JAVA looks more or less the same. The only changes are some of the syntax + the API names)
EDIT
FFS... seems like some Microsoft Evangelists couldnt handle the fact/truth about their beloved religion, so I going to post a few links explaining my statements.
Again - I was NOT trying to start a flamewar, as I like .NET - I just call it what it started as: A TOTAL RIP-OFF FROM JAVA (there I said it, flame me!)
As Microsoft couldnt push JAVA in their own prefered direction, they decided to "invent" .NET and decided NOT to include Java-VM any longer. Harming SUN's distribution and forcing customers to choose .NET or manually downloaded JAVA
Microsoft lost to SUN
Compare JAVA vs C# which could be developed without the flaws learned from the mother language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Java_and_C_Sharp
Again, I love .NET and C# for how easy things has gone, what I cant stand is the fact that people try to "hide" the truth of its origins. Give it some credits, thats all - and lets go build some awesome software shall we?
Btw. Android OS (from Google) is build on JAVA as its OPEN... so perhaps we should consider having a second look at that "oooh sooo old and mean JAVA" ???
I dont have a language/code religion... I choose the best tool for the task.