>> Agree, and thanks for the further clarification.

>> But there may come a time that MS starts a new platform and declares
>> their CLR supporting development tools as no longer strategic products.

Unlikely. Of course Microsoft may one day announce that they will remove DOS compatibility from the OS and Win32 compatibility and all that. But history shows us that operating system vendors do not generally do that. You can still run your DOS apps in Vista. While implementation technologies (languages for instance) are generally short-lived, platforms have a much much longer lifespan.

So while .NET will not be the platform of choice forever, it will be supported as part of the OS for a long time to come. Visual Studio as well as many other development environments will probably be history by the time .NET is still supported.

Markus