>>> 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.

But I'm not talking here about that kind of support. True, a DOS window is still possible and passively supported, by merely being possible. But the DOS window is no longer a strategic platform since MS started Windows and all companies and developers have drawn their conclusion when MS jumped to Windows. They all bent with MS. But hey, MS and the users all had more or less the same reasons to do so, and they all felt it were valid reasons!

This time MS may have reasons (which I'm still anxious to hear) that are not necessarilly felt as being valid by all companies and developers.

And the same thing may happen with .NET. If MS stops calling it a strategic product, all companies and developers using it are in trouble, because of the lifecyclesupporttimeframe (something like that) that is tested by decision makers, rather than whether or not some DLLs remain to exist in the Windows folder.