Happy Birthday To The Code I Use Every Single Day, and Which Has Supported My Teaching and Research…
Happy Birthday To The Code I Use Every Single Day, and Which Has Supported My Teaching and Research for Nearly 20Years: Meet .NET
“It was 20 years ago today, that Bill Gates taught the band to play”
Yesterday, was the 20th birthday of Microsoft .NET. And, so, I have a little secret. While you may think I spend my time coding for Python, Golang, Node.js and Rust, actually there’s a little bit of magic that allows me to present these things in an engaging way: Microsoft .NET. I thus say Happy Birthday to .NET, and here’s to the next amazing 20 years.
It was 20 years ago, today …
Where were you 20 years ago? For some of my students, they weren’t even born. For me, it was an exciting time as the computing-focused academics from the schools of engineering and electrical engineering were merged into the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier [here]:
I basically had a Web site that I thought — at the time — looked good, but it looks horrible by today’s standards. My main teaching at the time was CNDS (Computer Networks and Distributed Systems) and NOS (Network Operating Systems):
I was basically teaching computer networking and data communcations, and which has since given me a solid base for cybersecurity.
It is was around the same time — 14 Feb 2002 — that .NET 1.0 was released. Overall, for me, one of the best things I’ve done in my career was to pick .NET and C# as my coding foundation. At the time, I was well used to C programming, but I didn’t much like C++, so C# was just perfect for me. It also came with my favouriate application of all-time: Microsoft Visual Studio. And since, .NET has allowed me to build Web sites that have scaled well, but also provided me with a platform to me to automate much of my work. It has scaled up my output, as I do not have to bother too much about the actual delivery mechanism.
Overall, .NNET 1.1 was almost like a finished product, and gave us everything we needed for a cross-platform environment. It was fast, secure and could run on lots of different systems. With .NET 2.0, the vision of Microsoft was almost complete, and they have since brought together various application areas of research into further versions. The great thing is, is that something written in an earlier version will run on later versions of the .NET framework. A simple install allowed the framework to be setup and to be easily upgraded to newer versions. It has largely been free of major security bugs, that Java and Flash always struggled with.
Basically, .NET was Microsoft’s answer to the ever-rising threat of Java, which allowed programs to be compiled to an intermediate language and then run within a run time environment. The worry for Microsoft was that these types of programs could allow users to move away from the Microsoft Microsoft Windows and PC environment. And so, to head off Java, Microsoft focused .NET on the building enterprise solutions:
It was even promoted by their Chief Software Architect - Bill Gates:
If you are interested, it was actually John Howie [here] — a Director at Microsoft at the time — who tipped me off that .NET was the future:
From Flash to .NET
I was a very early adopter of C# and .NET, as I needed to move many Flash programs to something that would scale well. Here is my old Flash program for simulating a Cisco device:
Unfortunately, the more Cisco commands I added, the more it become more difficult to maintain them. Also, at the time Flash was moving from a scripting language in which you could use variables whenever you wanted (ActionScript 1.0), without ever declaring them. While this works well for a small program, it was not scaleable. The new language was ActionScript 2.0, which integrated code in a more formal way, but, as it was kinda like Java, which I personally disliked (even though I’ve written a book on it), so I moved to Microsoft .NET 1.1, and I have never looked back.
Microsoft .NET 1.1, 2.0 and so on
I picked up on .NET 1.1 at the time, as it just worked so well, and had a strong development infrastructure. As far as I can tell, this must have been around March 2003:
I then ported over my Flash-based Networksims package into Microsoft .NET:
.NET ASP.NET MVC
The port to Windows worked fine, but it has become difficult to maintain and is fixed to Microsoft Windows. Users needed to install the program, and where I needed to push out updates. But the real genius of using .NET was the port from Window’s code to the Web. Overall, I believe no other programming environment would have allowed me to take all of my existing code, and port it into a Web application.
But this Web approach was different, as it allowed me to use MVC (Model, View and Controller). This was definitely the best software porting decision I ever made and separated the user interface (the View) from the middleware (the Controller) and from the data sources (the Model). From there I could now design the interface through CSHMTL and CSS, which did not affect the underlying program:
Building scalable Web sites
So, I am a teacher, and I don’t want to teach software development. I have taught programming, and I personally found it boring. For me, I have always needed to teach theory through code, and bring that alive. To me, coding is just a way to teach, and where the theory turns into practice.
My once-in-a-lifetime opportunity came when I had the chance to build a complete Web site to support the education of Scottish pupils, teachers and parents. It was a great chance to work with an innovative book publisher: Bright Red Publishing. For this project, we received the support of Interface Online, and I turned to ASP.NET to built the Bright Red Digital Zone using C#. This allowed me to investigate more interactive ways of learning Physics and Maths [here]:
and while subjects like Maths and Physics were my main interest, I could even integrate language translations for Spanish, French and German:
.NET guided me through the whole process, where I could work with a graphical design team on the user interface, and which I could integrate into the back-end code and logic. We could then easily change the colours of the pages just on the books that were selected. I also managed to create an automated convertor from the books into the Web pages. It all worked so well, and it still works today. I think it is the only complete Web site for Scottish pupils that has online material for virtually every subject that they can study for the main assessments.
Asecuritysite.com
So, I’m a teacher and a researcher, and I want to use code to support my teaching and to investigate new methods. And, so, it was through my porting of Networksims, that I started to add new educational elements related to a new topic that I was teaching — computer security [here]:
This was Feb 2013 and provided me with a more sensible base to build on than my previous HTML attempts. And, today, I still add code almost every day and find old, current and new methods. Overall, though, it still functions much the same as it did in 2013 [here]:
It doesn’t need any fancy graphical interface, as it just needs a way to provide a consistent way to present the content, and that is what ASP.NET is good at. And, so, rather than just teaching to our students, the site reaches out to millions across the world, with nearly 1.5 million users per year, and 32 million accesses:
And all thanks to .NET!