What does .NET stand for? Is it an acronym?

Question

I've seen pronunciation guides and all sorts of definitions of .NET as a framework, but no definition or explanation of the actual name of the framework.

Wikipedia doesn't seem to know. This question didn't cover it.

Anybody know? Is it pure marketing-generated nonsense, or does it mean something?

Answer 1

About 10 years ago, I was part of the large team in Redmond working on the set of projects which became ".net". This was during the time the decisions were being made about what to name this work. I can tell you from first-hand experience that ".net" is not an acroynm.

Instead, the James Kovacs blog post that Jim W posted is accurate: there was a long list of names that the team cycled through and rejected before finally settling on ".net". The final name was chosen because it:

• mirrored the domain suffix of (at the time) every ISP, so was intended to remind users that "web-enabling your software" was the core scenario being targetted by this work
• was more approachable to business types and CIOs than geekier names like "Universal Runtime" or "COM+ 2.0"
• had practical benefits like: being short, easy to spell, globalized well, could leverage already-owned domain names for every Microsoft product, etc.
• actually passed legal/trademark review (surprisingly difficult!)

So it was intended to mean something, but more so by connotation rather than directly abbreviating or describing something. In other words, the name was only partly marketing nonsense! ;-)

More trivia

I don't remember the exact positioning (it's been 10 years!), but I believe that the name ".net" was supposed cover three basic things:

1. ".net Framework" - a new framework for writing web-enabled apps
2. ".net web services" - a way of accessing Microsoft (and others') software over the web programmatically using open standards and protocols (anyone remember "Hailstorm"?)
3. ".net enterprise servers" - a set of products which made bulding web-enabled applications easier.

In practice, only the first meaning stuck with users. The others morphed into other names (e.g. "Windows Server System") or were genericized by the public (e.g. "web services", SOA, etc.). Anyway, that's why you don't see Microsoft products named "<product name here>.NET Server" any more-- Microsoft wisely decided to limit the ".net" name to the things that developers actually thought of as ".net"!

BTW, in addition to being short and easy to spell and say, ".net" as a name also helped with the web services strategy which Microsoft was persuing at the time, which revolved around (and still does) offering software which was also available in the cloud. The idea was that we'd have, for example, Office.com for a hosted UI version, and Office.net for the APIs. The name also was convenient since Microsoft already owned the .net domain-name variants for every microsoft product.

There's a funny T-Shirt (I think Don Box had them made?) which lists all the considered names (e.g. URT, COM+, etc.) with thick red lines drawn through all the names except the last one (".net"). The list goes from the top of the shirt right down the back, like a long list of cancelled Mötley Crüe tour dates, but nerdier!

Answer 2

It's not an acronym.

In the beginning - around 1997 - there was Project Lightning. It was also known as Project 42 because DevDiv (Microsoft's Developer Division) lived (and still lives) in Building 42 on the Redmond Campus. (I've always thought that was an awesome building number for DevDiv with the little hat tip to Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I've always wondered if it was intentional.) Early press announcements referred to it as "Next Generation Windows Services". Eventually Project Lightning was dubbed Microsoft .NET, though some code names have been forever baked into the system.

Marketing was thinking of calling it COM+ 2.0 or the Universal Runtime (URT). Another idea was the COM Object Runtime (COR). Hence mscorlib.dll, which is still the assembly that holds the CLR's main types and is the one assembly that must be loaded in every .NET app domain. (System.dll is often loaded, but need not be. Mscorlib.dll contains the code for System.String, System.Int32, etc. You honestly can't do anything without mscorlib.dll loaded.)

http://www.jameskovacs.com/blog/CNETHistoryLesson.aspx