At first glance the .NET framework appears as a new departure for Microsoft - moving from compilation to native code, to compilation to tokenised code. However, much of what you see in the .NET framework has its roots in the technologies that have come out from Redmond over the last twenty years or so. The .NET framework is a culmination of those technologies in a bold attempt to try to unify Windows development. Much of the .NET base classes owe more than a passing resemblance to the Win32 API. Very little of the base class library seems to look like anything that could be described an existing cross-platform standard.
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