"It's worth nothing that under Muglia, server and tools now accounts for 20 per cent of Microsoft revenue, having grown from $10bn in revenue in 2005 to $13bn last year."

..or would it be worth noting?

If Microsoft want to foster clients and developers they need to make the languages not subject to arbitary decisions on the direction they should go and then every 2 or 3 years change their minds.

Concerning Visual Basic , they are not going to get the majority of developers back unless they stop this fiddling with the language and types of data structures it supports. They also need to go to the original language because the new one is just scripting not a full proper basic language.

One more thing to get developers back into Visual Basic is to bring back the file commands that were taken out to support their own proprietory data formats and controls. Give back the ability to create and amend our own files for our own specific purposes.

eg. OPEN "backup.dat" for random as #filenum (filelen=len(customstruct)

while not end of file

process data and save contents

wend

CLOSE #filenum