Rod,

>I totally agree with everything you say here. The only thing that bothers me still (a bit) is the distribution aspect - it looks like the metadata in the MSIL package is their DLL Hell solution, so we've got metadata setups for CLR apps and continue with the Registry for regular apps. I think regular apps will be around quite a bit longer, but I guess I'll start worrying when it looks like CLR apps are crowding out the old-style apps.

The COM Interop layer has utilities to EXPORT typelib info from our COM servers into Assemblies, which create MSIL Metadata containing the CLSID, namespace, etc. This is what allows .NET apps to call into our COM objects, so I don't see where we have a problem there. I'm sure the COM Interop feature will be around for a long time yet.