This is an interesting rant by someone who has been a big .NET until now.

[link|http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9211/ddj050201dnn/| Mr. Grimes\ufffd Farewell]

"...This indicates to me that Microsoft is losing confidence in .NET. When I see the beta of Longhorn (due later this year), I will examine it carefully to see how much of it is implemented with .NET. I suspect very little will be. Here are some clues to look for: If Longhorn does not implement the shell, or will not allow you to extend the shell with .NET, then Microsoft has clearly lost their confidence. If Longhorn does not implement any services in .NET, then they will indicate (as I do) that .NET is not the right technology for running under the privileges of the LOCALSYSTEM account.

So if you've reached this far, you will get the impression that I have a very cynical opinion of .NET. The framework has a lot of promise, but I think Microsoft was far too ambitious releasing far too many assemblies much too quickly. As a result design suffered, but to provide backward compatibility, Microsoft could not simply redesign the whole library and deprecate the old one. So we are stuck with the library we have. Microsoft has allowed marketing to take precedence over technology: They created and promoted VB.NET simply as an attempt to get the bulk of Windows developers to use .NET, and not because there was any need for the language."