How ASP.NET began in Java

"ASP.NET happened after we shipped IIS 4.0 and everyone went on vacation. Scott Guthrie and I – Scott worked for me at the time, he was 22 years old, straight out of college - and we took advantage of the time everyone was on vacation to start brainstorming new ideas. We looked at ASP and how it was being used. I had worked on Visual InterDev so I had a lot of friends on that team, and we were looking at the new version, I think it was Visual InterDev 6.0, and we noticed how messy the code was. We said, how can we do better? Scott and I worked for a month and a half, and then when everybody came back from vacation in January we showed them a prototype and a PowerPoint deck, showed them this vision, and people said, 'keep working on it'."