BULLSHIT From that statement alone I can only surmise that you have never ever worked in IT, the client is ALWAYS part of the equation, a thin client still has firmware and connectivity issues. Not to mention that rolling out any sort of network upgrade goes from being a minor project, to a critical time sensitive operation. Furthermore there is some benefit to having the infrastructure distributed, if your central server fails (and it will) then you're entire company can continue to work locally while you repair or rebuild.

Technically with Windows 7 enterprise you can set up a client to boot from a VHD (I have seen this implemented as this is how Windows deployment services works), and in-fact to use network licenses of software(office etc.) however I've never actually seen this implemented. That said you could in theory go for a medium client? if that is a term? where the software is run locally but is based on network licenses. Personally I wouldn't want to try it, but that's me

and now the obligatory link to college humor: browsers and the modes of transportation they resemble

I had a friend that worked at MS... he said that the most common browser there wasn't IE... but firefox. So to me this is really the MS devs being selfish and wanting firefox to support h.264 content for HTML 5

There is one and ONLY one reason the DRM code wasn't released to Mono, and that reason is called the MPAA. The MPAA is scared shitless of linux and open source, which is why both the flash and silverlight DRM modules have never been released. So if you want to complain complain about that.

I talked to the IT department at my company recently about this... all of our infrastructure supports IPv6... only one little bit that doesn't... our upstream provider... so until ViaWest gets their act together... we won't have IPv6.

oh I know... but it's fun to make fun of it this way... since it is very superficially identical to the feudal land-granting system

... Where IANA is the king and owns all of the IP space... granting it to its dukes (RIRs).. who in-turn grant plots to the earls (ISPs) .... who inturn grant blocks to everybody else...

I don't think it's really correct to call anything in Silverlight a "web app" not only is it a client based runtime... but it really didn't get the necessary features to support a full featured webapp until Silverlight 3. What Silverlight is... is a step between a clickonce app, and a web page. I think MS's message is going to start becoming along these lines: "If you can do it in HTML5 the do, if you can't then use Silverlight." What that message says to me is that Silverlight is for apps that you want to make REALLY REALLY easy to deploy and are willing to live with the restrictions Silverlight places on that application.

<rant>Personally I think the tragedy of Silverlight... and indeed .NET in general is that MS has not made it more open, not so open as Java where it degrades into detrimental infighting, but open in the sense that it would be easy for Novell to implement Moonlight and Mono. I am one of the many .NET developers who wishes that Mono had brought WPF to linux. Why? Because at least then I could make apps that don't look like shit on linux. I presume that it never happened due to licensing issues over DirectX with MS, which is really a shame. Mono as a client runtime is a tragedy, what it could have done, and what it did is good... but not really any better than java. While the server runtime is worth talking about, it is as far as I am aware not used extensively, thus making it a failure.</rant>

The one SDL object per form...that is because WinForms is very thinly wrapped MFC/GDI+ and while for very simple UI applications it works great. It is fundamentally limited due to the fact that it is legacy reaching back to the 16bit windows days and is dependent on USER and GDI objects (these are very limited resources) and also has NO hardware acceleration on most machines.

As for DirectDraw... that IS the reason it doesn't work on Windows 7, Microsoft doesn't even ship those libraries to 7 unless they are specifically installed by the user, and why would they! They have Direct2D, a well designed (but currently buggy because it's new) framework. If you're programming .NET and want access to that power just use WPF which is a thinly veiled layer over DirectX10 (with a built in back compatiblity layer for XP) with some basic work already done for you. Why would you waste your time programming on an obsolete (and soon to be removed) component, when there is a fully supported, well documented framework already available!

While I know the OP wasn't interested really in 3D as a C# guy I have to give a shout out to XNA which has some excellent 3d capabilities from a managed language, I wish that MS would allow others to implement XNA as it would be a major boon to linux gaming if they did

To para quote a former boss of mine who worked on the Windows 95 team:

"Oh we never coded any thing in Perl... if we needed anything we just asked Larry to do it"

-David Theilen