Slipping through the .NET

Back in 2001 Microsoft announced a new devopment platform call .NET which looked an aweful lot like Java. It would lead to more secure code with fewer of the buffer overrun errors that where proving to be such a security nightmare at the time. The marketing people got hold of the .NET brand and stuck it onto everything diluting it to the point where it was completely meaningless. Since which time Microsoft's marketing have backed off leaving just the development platform, but it seems that Microsoft's developers might now be backing off .NET as well

Microsoft appears to have concentrated their development effort in Vista on native code development. In contrast to PDC03LH, Vista has no services implemented in .NET and Windows Explorer does not host the runtime, which means that the Vista desktop shell is not based on the .NET runtime. The only conclusion that can be made from these results is that between PDC 2003 and the release of Vista Beta 1 Microsoft has decided that it is better to use native code for the operating system, than to use the .NET framework.