Comment by bitwize
10 days ago
.NET was always a clusterfuck of naming, as in the early 2000s Microsoft was slapping the .NET label everywhere. .NET Passport (now known as Microsoft accounts), .NET My Services, Visual Studio .NET (which was the same as regular VS, just with support for building C# and VB.NET apps added), .NET Server 2003 (Windows Server 2003), et weary cetera.
In this respect, as in many others related to .NET, Microsoft was inspired by Java. In the late 90s, Java wasn't just a language, it was a VM, runtime environment, enterprise platform (Java EE, now Jakarta EE), smartcard technology, remoting protocol, operating system, desktop environment, floor wax, dessert topping...
So Microsoft did with .NET what they now do with Copilot, right? GitHub Copilot (AI-assisted code completion and chat), Microsoft 365 Copilot (the suite), Microsoft Copilot (the chat thingy), Windows Copilot (the chat thingy, but directly on Windows), Copilot for Azure (LLM doing RAG), Copilot for Dynamics 365 (I assume something similar)...