Hank,

You need to take a good look at how Microsoft functions and what's coming down the road.

- Each division is run as a separate entity. .NET was created by DevDiv and WinDiv has no obiligation to rewrite parts of the OS in .NET. Microsoft is not one big shark. It's a school of piranahs, each division out to win. Sometimes the piranah eats stuff it finds and sometimes it eats other piranahs.

- Now, having said that, there are some recent movements that indicate WinDiv *is* adopting things that DevDiv created, particularly XAML. The Silverlight/WPF team was recently split in three. One group stayed with DevDiv. Once group went to Windows Phone. One group went to WinDiv. Project Jupiter (you can search for info about it) looks to be Windows system DLLs that support and host XAML, meaning XAML is becoming part of the OS. IMO, this is good as the display technologies belong in Windows, not something bolted on afterwards.

- Companies are betting on .NET. I would not say it is a failed experiment. I see more and more demand for .NET developers.

- Gartner and other companies have said Windows Phone will become the number 2 phone by 2013-2015 (the year varies from one prediction to another). Development for WinPhone is .NET.

You should pick your development environment and tools based on what your customers are demanding. But, I only see more and more demand for .NET. It certainly is not a failed experiment.


>Google is your friend. <s>
>
>For many reasons (not the least of which was the intransigence of the OS team), .Net is a failed experiment. A grand experiment, with very good tooling, and a plethora of libraries. But in terms of a) integrating with the Windows OS (as contrasted with using wrappers), b) apps running everywhere and c) differentiating itself significantly from Java in terms of productivity, I'm not seeing a checkbox in the win column.
>
>Cappuccino is one of the major players in the "build it once and run it anywhere" school. Take a look at 280slides.com, for an example of Cappuccino at work. I dislike the emulation of Cocoa, and like the "high level programming" model (you never touch CSS).
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>And now Google will own them (but of course not own the open source Cappuccino). And they already have GWT. Where shall the twain meet?
>
>Hank