after past disappointments such as Silverlight
o rly?
Name three others. Hell, name one other. Silverlight - supported through 2020 according to MS so hardly defunct - has become something of a meme for writers on the Register but assuming without knowledge that a myriad other frameworks have been dumped and then implying it in every damn article is... well, it's the kind of reporting I expect from the Daily Mail, not the Register.
You might as well ignore the story altogether and just parrot Eadon's endless lies about .NET being deprecated and dead if you're going to do that.
I expect it from commentards. Those that aren't simply hating on Microsoft for fashion reasons while reading their support scripts and claiming love for linux distros they have never used and wouldn't recognize if you installed it for them and painted the name on the monitor glass have very clear agendas (oh look, Hans 1 commented! calling it all lies, what a fucking shock) and great steaming biases they can't see past. I expect it from Gavin Clarke on the grounds that he's a cretin.
But proper tech journalists, one hopes, should know better.
(Some idiot will now go on about VB6 and somebody else will make a half-joke about FoxPro, neither of which are part of the .NET framework and are therefore irrelevant).