Does it matter to developers that the current, and newer versions of .Net don't support windows 2000?
It scares me to think that several of my clients still use Windows 2000 and although I may decide to stop supporting Windows 2000 one day, I don't like that Microsoft is pushing it on people's products.
Could anyone see Microsoft doing this with XP in the future to spur sales of Vista and later?
Just to clarify, this is not a bashing of MS in any way, I love MS, but it is a genuine concern that I would like opinions on.
In contrast I can't see C++0x implementors saying "it won't work on windows 2000"
I'm really trying to convince myself that I should be switching to .Net but this is one of my concerns.
Considering that Microsoft has a double interest in this matter (selling you the new OS and producing the .NET framework), I would be very suspicious.
In actual fact, you will be able to support new .NET versions on older OSes using Mono, which is pretty much designed to be cross-platform and backwards-compatible.