Haha :)

I understand that it looks stupid, but knowing the way that MS think about these things (IE from the myriad blogs) it will be likely that they didn't want to introduce incompatibility between the behavior of 32bit and 64bit .Net.

If you're looking for a real answer though, you could do worse then hit up Raymond Chen's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/.

38.5Gb for a driver ? I'd complain!

Just for arguments sake (:P) Please expand on your reasoning that the .NET API (I presume you meant to say the .NET Framework) is 'dreadful' ?

I've been programming with it since it was released; and what ever epithet I could care to use; Dreadful is not amongst them.

On a related note, I recall an amazing flash demo from around the same time, it was called Ray Of Light.

Does anyone have an archive of that somewhere? I remember it had an interesting font where all the vowels were underlined.

I'll stab his b@stard face!

+1 truth.

This adds a whole new meaning to the term 'Ginger ninja'.

I personally like C!!

And then next year we can be more excited and call it C!1!

Thank you, I will check that out.

However, I have noticed improvements in CodeSearch recently, perhaps the'll save this one ...

Oh please don't let them take this offline!

Totally practical, I can see my elderly parents doing that, *and* the rest of the technophobic population of this hexadecimal-thinking 16 fingered planet on which we live :)

I actually agree but the the devils advocate in me says, if they did release this data in escrow, so to speak, the media wouldn't pay the attention it has done so far.

But yeah, it sucks badly that these so-called-hackers have publicly released innocent peoples docs.

As a .net implementation, Mono is actually very complete:
    http://www.mono-project.com/Compatibility

Which are these essential parts of which you speak?

There are many ways around this, interfaces, strategy factory and repository patterns, he'll even dynamic keyword or il rewriting solutions a lá Jon skeet or even code weaving with AOP solutions.