Australians take part in .NET framework design - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Australians take part in .NET framework design

By Vivienne Fisher, ZDNet Australia
February 15, 2002
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/Australians-take-part-in-NET-framework-design/0,139023166,120263481,00.htm

Australian universities and businesses were involved at the design stage of Microsoft's newest products launched yesterday, Visual Studio .NET and .NET framework.

Charles Sterling, .NET developer evangelist at Microsoft Australia, said there were a number of Australians involved in the initial design phrase of the .NET framework.

According to Sterling, Monash University, Queensland University, and the University of Sydney all had involvement. And of the 20 programming languages these latest products support, Sterling said four of them were written in Australia.

Languages such as Component Pascal, Mercury, and Eiffel have been running on the .NET framework since beta 1 was released. Sterling said they had been instrumental in figuring out how languages integrate with the .NET framework.

There were also a number of local organisations involved in using Visual Studio .NET and .NET framework at the beta stage. Worldwide more than 35 million copies of the products were released at beta. Sterling said the large numbers of pre-release copies was due to demand from developers, and also because it wanted feedback from the industry.

"Australians have actually been much more aggressive about taking up new technologies, particularly if they have technical merit," Sterling said. "We're seeing that here again--the uptake is faster in Australia than other places in the world."