Before all this Win8 broughaha, I don't think anyone was considering .Net to be "running out of steam". The Iron* projects were disappointing to see get dropped

Before all this Win8 broughaha, I don't think anyone was considering .Net to be "running out of steam". The Iron* projects were disappointing to see get dropped, but they never really were first-class citizens to begin with. In fact, if anything, over the past few years I'd say the general sentiment has been that .Net has now eclipsed the JVM as the "best" platform available. Obviously not being able to deploy to other OSes (ignoring mono, of course) was a problem, but not a big one for a lot of folks. C# is a language a lot of people really enjoy using, and F# has excited a lot of people and since it's "official" gets accepted in stodgy corporate environments quicker than some of the alternatives (Scala comes to mind). That said, yes, in the last month or two I have been surprised (but not disappointed) to see that MS seems to be reinvesting in C++. I'm a little confused by this Win8 stuff, though. I think MS focus on Silverlight over the past year or two was misplaced, when they should have been focusing on WPF first, and now I'm not really sure what the status of WPF is with "Jupiter".