>This would obviously not happen. The only lanagues within Visual Studio compile to managed code (the CLR) and integrate completely into the Visual Studio IDE shell. The next version of Visual Studio does not have .NET in the name. While you will still have .NET Framework, ASP.NET and ADO.NET, the next version names are Visual Studio 2005, Visual Basic 2005, etc.

I know you probably can't respond to this speculation but I take this as a tacit admission by Microsoft that the .NET brand name didn't make the market swoon quite as much as they had hoped. It never particularly appealed to me. (The name, that is; the technology has appealed to me from the start). I understand that Microsoft got religion about the internet, after a slightly tardy start, and everything became net this, net that. In this case I think the name was slightly misleading. There is still a need for software other than web apps. The .NET framework fully supports the development of such apps -- Windows Forms, etc. -- but you wouldn't know it from the name.

Mike