>>Personally, I very, very heavily doubt that the people that have been complaining here on the UT about .Net had anything to do with any changes.

Nobody is implying that people here *caused* changes. People here *did* correctly identify the need for change. Unlike all the various people you say you spoke to who are apparently better than anybody else here, but still missed it completely. Nothing would change if MS only ever listened to people like that.

>>From my own personal observation, which you could easily verify, a very large percentage of devlopers who frequent the UT and who fall into the highly qualified class of developers have moved onto .net.

Nobody here disagrees that many developers have decided to move to dotNET. That doesn't mean that the need for LINQ has not been obvious for a long time. Put another way: not everybody here had to wait until MS announced it before they saw the need for themselves. Some shrugged and moved regardless. Some decided to wait until the need was met. Others completely missed the whole point, but felt very clever.