Are Microsoft really transitioning to C#? I think it's more of an alternative to use where appropriate, but they are still supporting and encouraging new develo

Are Microsoft really transitioning to C#? I think it's more of an alternative to use where appropriate, but they are still supporting and encouraging new development in C++. I actually really like C#, but most applications written in it tend to be rather slow feeling and memory hungry, particularly GUI apps. Early in the Vista dev cycle, Microsoft's intention was to write much of it in .NET until they decided it was too slow. Even the apps that Microsoft themselves have written (e.g. SCOM) are pretty poor. That's fine for enterprise software, servers and so on where you can easily throw more hardware at the problem, but I'm very thankful that of the 100-ish processes running on my laptop at the moment, most are not written in C#. Also, Microsoft have recently been stating their intention to bring back some focus to native (C++) development for Windows. Though, I feel C++ is sub-optimal as a native language, given how easy it is to shoot yourself in the foot. It doesn't have to be so dangerous to write performant native code. Why is it that D never really took off?