[kenjackson]

As I remember it (and it is a long time ago), one of the key promises of Longhorn was it was to make .Net a peer of Win32.

I don't recall that, and I don't think it would make sense (although I'm not saying it wasn't the case). Win32 provides so many services it would be foolish to reimplement them. And .NET and Win32 come from the same company. If there was a feature that the .NET team needed exposed, it would probably be easier to get them from the Windows team than to plumb it themselves in a subsystem.

[rahoulb]

Well one thing i definitely do remember about Microsoft at that time was their "white papers" that were little more than made-up visions of a utopian future (which when implemented fell a long way short).

My favourite (from a bit earlier - mid 90s I think) was the "zero-configuration PC" - no matter which PC you logged into it would know all your settings, programmes and documents - which eventually materialised as a "synchronised My Documents folder".