A behind the scenes look at Microsoft, interviewing Scott Guthrie and other key figures at Microsoft on the initial steps towards what became the .NET Framework.

Scott Guthrie describes how he prototyped the first version of ASP.NET over one weekend in the Christmas of '97, and how Microsoft took the risky decision (at least at the time) to build almost all of it in C#.

Performance was a massive issue - with the initial versions of ASP.NET maxing out at only 4/5 requests per second - but eventually evolving into a system that could cope with thousands. Everything we now take for granted - easy access to the file system, COM interop, even adding two numbers together - were huge milestones at the time.

You can catch the next episode, on the evolution of Visual Studio .NET here, or the previous one on the early developer tools at Microsoft.