>When WinRT was shown, C#/Dotnet was downplayed. Now XNA is downplayed - while games may be irrelevant to us,
>axing parts of the framework is not a good sign. As some games engines are in Ruby or Python, going down to C only
>in some critical portions, asking devs to code the whole game in C/C++ seems crazy.
>M.J.Foley is not what I call a good source, but others showed similar takes.

But as WinRT has been out and people have been playing with it, we know that .Net is a first class citizen.

>Ok, to much mental shorthand. Silverlight/Moonlight killing was necessary due to those crazy load times at startup.
>Nobody would allow such wait times. But the idea of having Dotnet apps available on android and iPhone had some merit.
>MS is keeping the desktop, but the desktop is loosing in a big way the lure of "personal computer" - that is becoming the
>smart device everybody cariies. Having a foot there via monoDroid/monoTouch without the smell of "other company"
>might lure some of the iPhone developers targeting all mobile platforms to Dotnet: IMHO one of the best platforms
>if you include the Xamarin offerings.

Xamarin is not going away. They're still there, working on mobile devices. And, they're making money.

>
>One of the things Google optimizes with the GWT Java>>JS crosscompiling is agressively eliminating unneeded code,
>making the amount downloaded more palatable. Something similar might have saved Silverlight.
>
>And too much of the VS expirience is still linked to creating screens with top-level names the way VB5 did -
>and en passant generating oodles of other code, which is hidden in codebehind.
>Wasteful - if the dev has to read/debug for once or the code has to downloaded on hit instead of on install.

Java is all about multiple devices. Why would Microsoft care about crosscompiling? As for VS, have you seen anything in MVC and MVC routing is now available in ASP.Net