Not trying to be pedantic, just posting to set the record straight: - WPF, WinForms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET etc. etc. are all officially part of the .NET Framework.

Not trying to be pedantic, just posting to set the record straight: - WPF, WinForms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET etc. etc. are all officially part of the .NET Framework. - WPF doesn't do much (or any) direct interaction with Win32. It uses Direct#D for rendering. - The CLR is the .NET equivalent of the JVM. It's useful to look at the .NET Framework the same way as the standard library that ships with the JVM. They're both large standard libraries that include GUI Library (AWT, Swing, JavaFX, Winforms, WPF), database access (JDBC, ADO.NET). In both cases, the extensive standard library can easily be used by multiple languages (i.e. VB, C#, F# in .NET, Java, Scala, Clojure and many others on the JVM).