Wildgrape NewsDesk is a .NET-based RSS viewer.  There is not much there that I haven't seen before in an RSS viewer, except clean (less feature means less clutter) and somewhat crispy (tender loving care of layout) GUI with no-nonsense functionality.  What caught my attention is its use of .NET 1.1 beta framework.  Geesh.  I thought I was taking a big risk by using .NET 1.0!

More I use .NET, more problems I find.  Interoperating with Win32 is a chore, having to manually import Win32 API one function at a time, an error prone process.  There are odd bugs too like RegistryKey.SetValue method's confusion over UInt32.  What bothers me the most is the lack of aggressive plan to increase .NET installbase.  20 megabytes is not something users will casually download unless its porn.  Only solution I see around this problem is to bundle .NET Framework 1.1 with IE 7.  Will Microsoft do this?  I doubt it.

I don't think .NET will be ubiquitous on desktops until .NET 3.0 is released two year from now.  Until then, .NET makes sense only for server-side software.  So the situation is a mixed revisit to Windows 3.1 and Java.