Enterprise Systems:.NET: Microsoft's Enterprise Ticket? Great coverage, as usual, by Jon Udell. Could have been written almost two years ago, however; interesting that there's apparently still so much market confusion about .NET. For the history file: "The genesis of .NET, according to Philip DesAutels, Microsoft's product manager for XML Web services, is often attributed to an internal memo from software architect Dave Stutz calling for a framework that would encapsulate best practices of software development. Chief among those best practices was componentization. Support for easy creation, deployment and use of components became the dominant theme of the Common Language Runtime (CLR)—the virtual machine (VM) at the heart of the recently released .NET Framework."