The arrival of the .Net platform in 2000 from Microsoft brought a true change in programming which employed a common JIT engine. The style of programming was strict and object orientated. There was backward compatibilty to Visual Basic and a new languge was introtuced namely c#. This radical departure caused many a programmer to rethink their future direction, many stuck with Visual Basic but struggled with fitting into the new platform old concepts, many however immediately saw C# which is in many ways similar to Java as the future direction of programming. The early adopters were curtailed by the .com crash and left programming altogether whereby a select few continued on advancing with the new language. The result of this is that the majority of .Net programmers in the market are new arrivals often with less than 3 years experience in the language and virtually no commercial experience in the real world.  When a programmer is found with more than 8 years experience in .Net this is a rare commodity indeed and much prized by many companies who appreciate its significance.

With version 1.0 of the .Net framework it can be seen that the language itself is not so strict an allows certain actions not permitted in the newer versions. True threading capabilities as in C++ was in its infancy in C# which finally become of age in 2.0. Version 3.5 an extension of version 2.0 introduced tighter programming restrictions and new concepts which resulted in a mature product, with version 4.0 promising even greater improvements.