Bregors, when you were talking about creating apps in Win32 instead of .NET, that was right, a lot of people seem to be experiencing slowdown with apps created with .NET.
<rant>
Ugh.
Why is everyone so afraid of progress and change?
I remember when windows 95 came out. The complaints were practically identical to those in this thread. Why? Mostly because people were attempting to upgrade it on their Windows 3.1 hardware. The brilliant marketing department at Microsoft, in an attempt to reach the largest group of people possible, low-balled specifications. Consequently, this didn't create the most compelling experience for a lot of people. Sound familiar?
As I mentioned earlier, .Net has been out for several years, and only just recently is it being pushed heavily to the home user. Today's home computer hardware is just now at about the levels of the servers that ran the first .Net applications.
.Net addresses a lot of shortcomings of traditional compilers. Including type safety, garbage collection, rapid development, cross platform binaries, and an executable that is compiled in a way that's tailer-made to your current environment. In a lot of ways, it's a design that is tradionally ANTI-Microsoft in nature. Anyone who's been developing software professionally and seriously for a long time will tell you that .Net is one of the things that Microsoft has done right. Even the most rabid Microsoft haters generally admit this.
When you're running a .Net application on under-powered hardware, it's hard to appreciate or even see the benefits.
Truth be told, sometimes powerful software requires powerful hardware. .Net is powerful software. Nobody even questions why 3D Studio Max needs significant processing capability to be usable. .Net is really not that much different.
.Net is an abstract concept, capable of having a life significantly longer than Win32. Hardware doesn't stagnate, and if software didn't try to keep up or anticipate where we will be in the near future, we wouldn't be nearly where we are today. The 32-bit era's death is long overdue, and .Net applications will make the transition to the next evolution in hardware a lot less painful.
Now... how ya like DEM apples? (Speaking of apples... did you know .Net can run on the Mac via the Mono project?)
</rant>