I'm not a big fan of Microsoft products for developers. I prefered Borland products until they decide to adopt .NET. So I won't try to defend .NET but I'd like to say that I really appreciated the Express and Community editions a few years ago. At home, I could do a lot of things with a modern and simple language without spending a dime, and I used the same product than at work (with some limitations, but never hindering). I was working with Java too at this time, and it was unthinkable for me that I use Java at home. Slow, ugly, not fully integrated...
I recently wrote an equivalent of Putty for my job, to include specific features, entirely in C# .NET. It was a good experience and the result works very well (I still use it everyday), but I agree that I had to face some issues when it came to install it on many different computers, with different OS and different .NET versions. Nothing really blocking because I didn't use the latest OS with the latest .NET version (I do the same with Android).
Not really true: Silverlight and some parts of Visual Studio (e.g. the user interface) were made with .NET. And there are probably other examples to find but I'm too lazy to do it.
That's also true with .NET. Why do you say that's not true ? With Windows 7 and Windows 8, I still use some apps that I wrote in the early days of .NET.
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