I read both of those when originally posted. But both are now somewhat outdated.

Richard Grimes talks about .Net Remoting. It's now being replaced with Windows Communication Foundation.

He also complains that Avalon seems to be an ASP killer. I disagree. There is a huge need for web-based products that work in browser on Linux, Unix, Mac, and Windows. Developers are smarter about this than Richard gives them credit.

He also says that Microsoft has lost confidence in .Net. Nothing can be further from the truth. The entire new Expression suite is written entirely in .Net AND use Avalon extensively.

Richard is considered one of only two people (Don Box being the other) that really knows COM. My guess is Richard had some fear that his bread and butter was going away. He has stated that he never made money on .Net development.

Joel Spolsky writes, "The MSDN Magazine Camp is always trying to convince you to use new and complicated external technology like COM+, MSMQ, MSDE, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and its components, MSXML, DirectX (the very latest version, please), Windows Media Player, and Sharepoint..."

COM+ and MSMQ are not longer the "MSDN Magazine" way. It's all Indigo...umm, I mean Windows Communication Foundation. DirectX is no longer the "MSDN Magazine" way. It's Avalon, err, Windows Presentation Foundation.

The "Raymond Chen" camp isn't left out. There are thousands of new APIs in Windows Vista.

Spolsky further complains about MSDE being complicated and external. Is he implying that the OS should also house the data store? Yes, MSDE has some issues, but SQL Server Express has pretty much removed those.

Yes, WinFx will run on XP and 2003 Server, but there are many, many reasons to upgrade to Windows Vista. Security will be greatly improved. The OS will be more stable due to device drivers running in a different security context than the kernel.

I could go on.

>"If you look at Richard Grimes history with .Net, you'll find that he's complained about it for years and has actually stopped developing with it."
>
>Here's an article from Richard about .NET.
>http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9211/ddj050201dnn/
>
>also this article is interesting:
>http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
>
>Regards
>Christian