There are some very interesting little comments in that article - which are not really obvious but a pretty good indication on what's to come...

I've been working with the PDC Preview of VS.Net for the last week and it's VERY different from what you might think. Reading a document like the one mentioned above doesn't quite do justice just how different things really work.

The runtime IS the language. I wrote a couple of small C# applets (about 1000 lines of code or so) and I moved them to VB in a few minutes with a handful of replaces. The runtime takes over just about all aspects of programming. In fact the C# language has only likk 50 language constructs - all the rest comes from the runtime. COM is totally downplayed int he languages (throw out the old???) and there's not even native support for calling COM objects from C# - you have to import them and create special wrapper 'assemblies'.

The comment I was most interested in in the document was about performance. These managed application currently are VERY SLOW and very large. Heck a hello world program in a WinForm is 14 megs <s>... a console hello world is still 6 megs. Web Services and ASPX pages take upwards of 10 seconds to load for the first time - faster thereafter as they compile. Obviously this is still an early preview, but I have a feeling while things may improve some, we're getting even more bloatware than before.

I don't know how that fits into most people's development, but it seems like taking a huge step backwards for gaining only limited new fuunctionality. Plus the whole CLR needs to be installed everywhere before it takes. It's kind of like Windows 3.x all over again - forever waiting for people to catch up with hardware and software.

Anybody else running the PDC Preview? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts...