From Microsoft? I must be dreaming here.

er... WPF was Windows Presentation Foundation last time I looked. And Extensible Application Markup Language was also known as XAML.

Sort your QA out, Reg

How much Microsoft have learned from the mono project...

An update to .Net is too late for me...

.Net corrupted on my Vista Ultimate. Various MS blogs and articles suggested ngen updates, sfc /scannow, etc with a last resort of reinstalling.

I'm sure reinstalling will fix it, but as far as I'm concerned... it's WinXP TCP/IP stack all over again. If it munts the system that badly, a reinstall from scratch is the only real real fix since Vista installs .NET as built-in components. I've even tried installing SP1 (from TechNet)

That said, my machine now runs WinXP Pro again and I'll reconsider Vista only if I get desperate.

...must mean that it will be able to exist side-by-side with the 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and 3.0 .NET frameworks. I mean, the idea that a newer version might possibly *replace* an older version is just too absurd to contemplate.

"the updates will make it quicker and easier for applications to be installed and started by users without changing an application's code and *without re-compiling the application.*" (my emphasis)

is basically that Microsoft admit that their own programming is crap and they can finally be bothered to fix some of it...

If it were not for MS's addiction to backwards-compatibility, world + dog would probably be running some derivative of OS/2 and the x86 architecture would be dead, buried, resurrected in the hereafter and sitting on the right hand of Bill by now.

This is the company that sold DOS-with-a-GUI-front-end for several years, just so that in extremis you could drop the GUI and run your ill-behaved POS DOS program natively.

Don't act surprised that they're providing back-compatibility. Then again, don't act surprised when it doesn't work either.....

"This is the company that sold DOS-with-a-GUI-front-end for several years, just so that in extremis you could drop the GUI and run your ill-behaved POS DOS program natively."

Was that the only reason? Purely for backwards-compatability? Not just 'cos it was considerably easier (and cheaper, presumably) to run Windows as a POS GUI on top of the POS OS?

Don't get me wrong, though. Some of the best OSs have been / are GUIs on top of CLIs, but I have to say I'm not sure Windows was ever among the truly great or good...