>Evan,
>sounds like you want your cake and eat it too. If what you suggest would be possible, man that would be great... but seems awfully unlikely we'd get the best of both words when all the other VS tools that are migrating to the CLR havent given mention of making use of the CLR as an optional kind of thing.

Actually, with VC.NET, it is optional. You can write 'managed' or 'unmanaged' code, which means code that runs under the CLR, or an old-style C++ exe.