I think that the addition of WinRT has made a lot of things much more complex in the short run, but I'm willing to wait and see - I think that the long term vis

I think that the addition of WinRT has made a lot of things much more complex in the short run, but I'm willing to wait and see - I think that the long term vision of a portable subset that runs everywhere is pretty attractive. This is definitely a time of transition, so there's going to be some pain involved as everything gets sorted out. I think you're a bit off base on open source - there's not the same level of emphasis as on some other platforms, but there's a fair amount of high quality open source stuff for the platform, whether by Microsoft (F#, ASP.NET MVC, etc.) or by the community (Mono, Service Stack, nHibernate, etc.). The move towards NuGet packages has increased the momentum here significantly. I also think that you're not being fair when you talk about Microsoft switching directions on developers. It's certainly true that the new hot MS technology may come out in 3 months and the way you've been doing things may no longer be recommended, but I can't think of any company as good as Microsoft at supporting their legacy technologies.