Couple of Historical Facts

  • Article

At first when I started to see things I've worked on talked about in articles I thought it was pretty cool.  And then I started to realize how much is taken down incorrectly.  I'm sure it is hard to piece things together after the fact.  Take this article.

A couple corrections:

  • The CLR was actually built out of the COM+ team as an incubation starting in late 1996.  At first we called it the "Component Object Runtime" or COR.  That's why several of the unmanaged DLL methods and environment variables in the CLR start with the Cor prefix.
  • There were several language projects underway at the start.  The C++ and languages teams both had ideas (Cool was one of them), and in the CLR we wrote Simple Managed C or SMC (pronounced 'smack').  We actually wrote the original BCL in SMC.  It was a leap of faith to convert to C#.  At the time the IL instruction set was changing quite a bit and having our own compiler checked into the tree was very handy.  In the end we wound up releasing the SMC compiler in the SDK as a sample.

Given how much work was done on the runtime, languages, and IDE, it was quite surprising things didn't leak by the time we did the formal product launch at PDC 2000 in Orlando.  Since that time (thankfully) we've tried to be much more transparent with the products we are building.