Foxfire wrote:So I'd say it is absolutely valid to claim that (at least) for Vista Microsoft has lost its confidence in .NET.
P.S. It would be interesting to know WHY all that stuff was removed from Vista. At least on my test-machine (which isn't powerful at all) the early versions ran comparably well to the current versions.
This came up on CodeProject recently. Over there I said that I didn't think MS had lost confidence in .NET in general, but that .NET 2.0 was specifically too immature in the middle of the Longhorn development cycle - changing too much, too often - to be treated as a stable dependency. Larry Osterman has said here that the Longhorn Reset - where they decided to ditch the then-current builds and return to the Windows Server 2003 SP1 codebase - occurred because inter-component dependencies were out of control, with a lack of stability in the foundations causing knock-on effects on reliability all over the codebase. I recall him saying 'this was no way to write an operating system.'
Saying that they ditched the current build doesn't mean that they completely threw away all the changes and rewrote from scratch - it doesn't. It does mean they began the process of integrating changes from scratch, with much tighter controls over what went in. Some code which did meet the new quality bars probably did get integrated straight away, but other parts needed to be rewritten to meet the new standards. Because of this effective restart the scope of the project was reduced, and some of the more ambitious features had to go.
