My 2 bits (Score 1)

Writing in .Net is productive. It's fast, effiicent, and easy to write for.
The tremendous Base Class Library, and all the extra technologies(LINQ et al) won't make me a better programmer, but they do make me nimble, and allows for fast structural changes.

When I code in C++ (I only learned GNU not Microsoft all those '__' make me nervous), I spend a lot of time plumbing, ensuring patterns are correct, and resources are correctly allocated to be correctly disposed. I spend a lot of time laying out corner stones, and taking measurements. In .net I can happily lay a cheap foundation for given project and just go for it. If I have made a mistake it's still a pain to correct, but it's not nearly as damaging as in can be found in an unmanaged environment. The CLR, and C# almost insist that you play around with it to get the right solution for your thinking, and like I say, it's mostly productive tinkering your doing. It's not about class resources, or static entry points it's about developing the solution and solving the problem.
For that alone I find .net worth it's weight in floppy disks, and punchcards(I'm using measurement to ensure the crumdugeonly posters before me can follow my level of praise). Then you have Visual Studio's tool chain, at which point I'm going to get misty eyed, and making hooting noises, because it's undeniably fantastic.
I'm a Sharepoint developer (Put the sarcasm down), which from an API standpoint sits on top of a truck of COM objects and IIS, and boy do we know about it. SPWeb.Dispose() (for a given context of SPWeb), is a founding tennent of SharePoint development, not only does it leak, it costs. Sharepoint Sandbox development takes even further but actually assigning a cost (points) based on the actions of the application, thanks to a amanged code environ. SharePoint is a system that ties into AD, Exchange, Office, IIS and SQL Server, out of the box. If you did not have a managed code environment to resting over all of that plumbing, communication, instation of objects, threads (IIS, and Windows and SQL) etc then how on earth could a product like that exist in the first place? For example the Open Text offering (I forget the name of the product, one part used to be called red dot), needs two servers to handle publishing, and moves between, python, java, asp and some .net too! It's a little unweidly.
In short: .net allows to me solve problems by writing code, rather than creating a frame to phrase problem, that lets me to solve problem using code.
Anyway back to my Windows only technology, and the IE/Firefox/Opera/Safari cross broswer Sharepoint site I've been building.