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Comment by billforsternz | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, .NET must be the worst, most misleading, least googleable product name ever. I suppose we should be grateful that MS called an earliest technology COM not .COM.

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The first result I get googling for ".net" is the Wikipedia article ".NET Framework". The first result I get for "COM" (or "com") is Microsoft's page on "COM: Component Object Model Technologies".

Honestly, I have never had a problem googling .NET and COM-related stuff.

It was mostly a problem when you were having a conversation with someone that went something like...

"So I was installing .NET and it failed because I didn't have the right drivers for my SCSI card."

"What? I've never needed disk drivers to install .NET, which version was it? 1.1?"

"No, it was 2003"

or...

"Can you install .NET on my PC?"

"Sure, done"

"Where's Word and Excel?"

"What?"

This is after it became popular, and Google (I assume) just special-cased it. Back when it first came out, though, typing that into any search engine we had back then would mostly just give you tons of domain names that end with ".net".

Then also, we had Office .NET, Visual Studio .NET (with Visual Studio .NET 2003 added later), and pre-release versions of what was to ship asWindows Server 2003 were known as Windows .NET Server for a while.

Web services (the SOAP and XML kind) were the next big thing back then, at least as far as Microsoft was concerned, and so the entire software stack was promoted as conceptually centered around that - hence the .NET name. Kinda ironic, what with the rise of cloud computing later, when .NET brand was already toned down to refer to the framework specifically, and the consequent need to invent "Azure".

Back then I just used MSDN.

It could have been worse. The original internal name for .NET before the rebranding was COM+ 2.0, if I remember correctly. You can still see some legacy of that in names like COMPLUS_ZAPDISABLE (an environment variable that disables loading of ngen'd assemblies by the CLR).

Somewhat more indirectly, it also surfaced in low-level native APIs used to host CLR inside an app, with names like ICorRuntimeHost - if I remember correctly, COR here stands for Common Object Runtime. Also seen in mscorlib.dll (the assembly containing the most fundamental types, which is the top node in any CLI assembly dependency graph) and mscoree.dll (EE = execution engine).

Oh, and C# was COOL (C-like Object-Oriented Language).

I must say Google handles it well. I'm searching with these terms quite often and Google knows .NET == dotnet ~ C# and finds results without much problems.

Google is terrifyingly good at finding relevant developer documentation. I'm convinced it will be writing software for us in a couple years.

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