When Windows Server 2008 R2 was launched, the "server core" edition started to become useful to me, because it lets me deploy .NET background applications isolated on their own virtual machine instance with only a small fraction of all the disk space overhead of a default Windows Server installation, and very few Windows Updates. It comes with a subset of .NET 3.5 SP1 integrated (as an optional feature).
Now that .NET 4.0 is released, the redistributables explicitly state that it's not support on Server Core. Any chance that there will be a separate download available for Server Core (e. g. without WPF) any time soon, has anybody heard about it?
Anything I have read says no. I would imagine that this will change but unfortunately it doesn't look like it will be soon.