Lately I've been hearing the "we should investigate .Net" discussion. My initial reaction is that .Net is way cool, if you are willing to commit to a Microsoft-based architecture from top to bottom. And if you can wait for all of .Net to actually ship.

My caution was with the vendor lock-in, and how Microsoft has treated developers over the last few years. All the people who invested money in developing C++ based COM systems have a good deal of refactoring to do. If you want to leverage the power of .Net, you really have to do it in C#. Making this kind of transition takes a lot of resources; think carefully before binding yourself so closely with a single vendor.

More fuel for the fire: Microsoft has "deprecated" its SOAP toolkit, in favor of APIs provided by the .Net framework. A lot of people have spent a great deal of time and money to build tools around that SOAP code. Now it is going away.

This is the problem with lock-in. Forced upgrades. They always seem to come at the worst time.