There must be a strategical reason behind this, I can't believe they'd make such a huge mistake. One possibility is that they're trying to corner the native la

There must be a strategical reason behind this, I can't believe they'd make such a huge mistake. One possibility is that they're trying to corner the native languages so developers start migrating more and more into managed runtimes. This gives Microsoft more power and control over what the programers are doing on their OS. Removing C++ would be too big a hit, so killing off C is the compromise they found. The fact that they recommend GCC is intriguing though, I can't quite make sense of that.