Interesting: I thought .NET was

Interesting: I thought .NET was all hype, but checking out the development environment described for the platform on MSDN makes me excited as a programmer... would be nice to have that kind of flexibility in development today.

Features such tidbits as:

In fact, Rational is planning to create a Java-language compiler that targets the .NET common language runtime.

and:

In fact, installing most .NET-based applications will require no more than copying the files to a directory, and uninstalling an application will be as easy as deleting those files.