The Return of the CLR

Otherwise known, as "Return of the Giant Hogweed"

Once upon a time, .NET was so new that there wasn't a Visual Studio .NET yet (the beta crashed every 5 minutes so you couldn't use it even if you wanted to), no books, few blogs and one had to use things like the Shared Source CLI or Rotor to figure out things in .NET along with command lines and notepad (some of us actually yearn for those days in some ways). In those days, I learned a lot about CLR Internals by going to the source Luke as shown in this post on 7/1/2002 on how to use Rotor (Here is the one I did for the MAC). The constant companion was my well-worn book Shared Source CLI Internals. I read this book so many times it was torn apart. For years, I gave a very popular CLR Internals talk at DevTeach and elsewhere.

Then it grew quiet. The .NET scene exploded but most people could care less about the "internals" like those in the early days. Rotor did get a V2 but few people cared again. People went on to drag data grids, .NET development was co-opted by the ALT.NET revolutionaries ("Did you declare a spike for that?") and it grew quiet for CLR wonks. .NET got no CLR changes after 2.0 until recently. Some CLR innovation did occur, especially in the area of cross-platform support, with Silverlight.

I am glad to see Joel announce a V2 draft of the Shared Source CLI Internals, along with Ted. I am super exited!!!!

The second part of the great CLR news is that there are finally some CLR changes in 3.5 SP1 to dig into. In the upcoming timeframe, you are going to see some new renewed focus from me on the basics and the CLR internals in this blog. In the meantime, I leave you with this re-creation of that magical night of 7/1/2002 with Vista. Long Live MSCOREE!