Uff I think it was actually before 2005. Was a long time ago. I recall it was open source, which was a surprise to me. It was definitely called dot net.

I think it was more towards 2001 or something, with the whole Java dispute between SUN and Microsoft. Visual J++ had some sort of dialect. (loved the IDE though, microsoft has always been good at developer tools).

Before that I was more interested in fahrenheit // openscene graph between Microsoft and SGI.