I had the good luck of chit chatting with Pablo Castro at length at VSLive. One of the things he suggested, and I thought was an awesome idea, was to include a slide on the various release dates for all this stuff coming out of MSFT.

Here is that slide to put an end to all confusions.

<<TADAAHHH>>

As you can see, there are a few key points to notice:

1. C# 3.0, LINQ, ADO.NET vNext and the whole sh-bang was never intended to be a part of WinFX - which is now .NET 3.0.

2. .NET 3.0 is really NET 2.0 + some extra stuff. So to develop for .NET 3.0, you will use Visual Studio 2005, with some additional add-ins and binaries you will download and install.

3. Vista and Sharepoint 2007 will be built on .NET 2.0 + .NET 3.0 (which is .NET 2.0+).

In other words, if you haven't already made a move to .NET 2.0, thinking that you will wait and watch for .NET 3.0 before you make that gargantuan move, you are a BLUDY FOOL!!!