I agree with the thread on paying for services. Yes they will not be free. However, I see nothing saying this signals the end to MFC and ATL. They can be used to build these services and many other applications. So this is no signal. A new option in VS 7 will be ATL Servers which will support the rest of the framework is one example

I agree with the surprise on the lack of responce. From my perspective and influence with my company your missing the core issue. JAVA is a proprietary language owned by a single company. It is a great concept that is limited by that fact. We will just have to see how .Net is recieved, to me the fact that it is being released as a public standard is a big factor. Microsoft or not