Hi Hank,

If Microsoft was serious about making Dot Net interoperable, there would be a Dot Net platform available for each OS as well as a free SDK. Since Microsoft owns Dot Net, Microsoft can extend it, closely coupling it to their Windows OS. This mean that all other non-Microsoft Dot Net initiatives must react to whatever Microsoft does in the way of extending Dot Net. This also mean that that there would be considerable headaces in porting a Windows Dot Net Application to other platforms, and would tend to encourage Organizations using a Dot Net Languages like c++ .net, VB .Net, and C# .Net, Visual Studio .Net to standardize on a Windows OS. If I wanted to write an enterprise class application that would run on Linux, Sun, AIX, and windows, it seem to me that Dot Net would not be a good choice. Java, C++, Ruby, Delphi, etc would probably make more sense in this scenaio.

I will say that Microsoft has been consistent in their approach regarding making its Windows family of languages interoperable on other platforms, both before Dot Net and after it. <g>