[Spearchucker]

There's not much in the newer wave of technology from Microsoft I find useful. In addition to your point, WPF (XAML) is without a doubt a better HTML, and yet can at times be as brittle as HTML. Workflow Foundation is conceptually good, but it's a beast - I'm constantly thinking it's a workflow-flavoured instance of dependency injection. WCF is better, but then I don't use it for more than what I used to do with server-activated objects in Remoting. LINQ is what makes C# and Visual Basic.Net functional, and it's cool for that - but LINQ a big no-no for perf-sensitive code paths. Too much plumbing. MFC is veeeery familiar, but not as fast (dev time) as .Net, so I stick with WinForms. Which does a reasonable job of OO for UI.