>Hi Mike,
>
>The article on which I based my statement appear in the October 2002 Software Development magazine title "C# The Sweet Spot". A portion follows:
>
>Obviously, Microsoft is interested in furthering the Windows platform, and C# and .NET will have the greatest appeal to people who have no problem with developing on and for Windows. While both the Momo (www.go-momo.com) and DotGNUPortable.NET (www.southern-storm.com.au/portable_net.html) projects are porting C# and other components of .NET to operating systems such as Linus and Mac OS X, it should be stated early and often that serveral of the most usefule libraries in the .NET Framework SDK, such as Windows Forms, remain proprietary to Microsoft.

I was going to quote this article but I see you've beaten me to the punch (I've been away from the UT for over a week). And you beat me to the point about .NET -- as you so state "Microsoft's .NET foundation extends way beyond the scope of the ECMA standard."

Bill Anderson