thing is that MS is a world class master at telling 'stories'.

Humour aside, .NET *is* a good story - what no one really knows for sure is how much substance there is behind it.
Yesterday a group of people from where I work went to MS to see a demo built using .NET (so they say) and it was very impressive.

It was Web Services sitting on an MS server accessing a SQL server and a mainframe.
The client was either a web browser accessing a web server which did SOAP transactions over the net to the MS Web Services server.

The client could also be a PDA (they showed HP Journada running apps via a CF 802.11b W-Fi connection to the Web Server.

They also (and this is interesting and impressive) showed that Office/XL eXcel ss/s/ program could be used to enter a form (closely resembling a govt paper form) to capture data & transmit it via SOAP transaction (built into XL) to the Web Services server.

As said, the demo was very impressive and to give due credit, showed the path to the future. But as always, I can't vouch for how robust of reliable the code underneath was. They claim the Web Services were written in C#.

As always with MS, if they are telling the truth then they have a very interesting position re Web Svcs & the tools available for non developers to create client front-ends to Web Services servers. If they are lying I guess as in the past, they will get away with it.

Cheers

Doug