Piotr Nienaltowski		Vaclav Skala

Guest Editorial

Dear Readers,

This volume contains extended versions of four papers selected among the contributions to the .NET Technologies 2004 workshop. The workshop was held in Pilsen, Czech Republic, from May 31 to June 2, 2004.

The purpose of the .NET Technologies workshop series is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and the industry to discuss the latest developments in .NET and andvance the state of the art in the research on related technologies. Interest in these topics has been continuously growing as a consequence of the importance and the ubiquity of object-oriented technologies. For .NET Technologies 2004, papers describing theoretical and practical results were sollicited in the following areas:

• software engineering,
• programming languages and techniques,
• parallel and distributed computing,
• algorithms and data structures,
• educational aspects of .NET,
• support for .NET on Unix.

Out of 31 regular papers submitted, 11 were accepted for the presentation at the workshop. The authors of of the best papers were invited to submit an extended version of the article to this JOT special issue. Four articles have been finally selected for publication.

We would like to thank the authors of submitted papers for the high quality of their contributions. We are very grateful to the programme committee members for establishing a selective workshop programme. We highly appreciate the work of the referees who helped us select the best articles for this special issue of JOT.

We hope to see you at the .NET Technologies 2005 workshop in Pilsen.

Best regards,