I have only had the SDK for a few hours and from what I can see C# and the CLR offer me no real benifit above and beyond my current development tools. On the face of it C# is really quite an elegant language however I just don't understand why the designers implemented a type safe dialect with the ability to just slot C++ (unmanaged) code into the code? Backward compatibility? If it is then I see this as a real big weight around the neck of C#'s evolution.

Their is definately a noticeable delay as the IL code gets turned into an executable image for the first time, even on small apps. Is this because its going through some JIT compiler?

I think the CLR offers some unique cross platform benifits if others OS vendors adopt/port it, but then again wasn't this a USP for the Java Virtual Machine?

First we had the Platform SDK, then we got MFC, then they said MFC was too fat with runtime support blighting it and introduced ATL. Even VB got native code compilation, now would someone at Microsoft be so kind as to explain to me "why I should ditch my investment in C++/Platform SDK/MFC/ATL and every other API in favour of their new Namespace/NET framework?"