While it's evident that Microsoft is staffed with a lot of top-notch people, history has empirically demonstrated that they have quite a few dregs as well: Just recall how disastrously the whole .NET thing was handled circa-2000.

For those who forgot, suddenly every product (including those finished or on the verge of being finished) became a part of the .NET vision, even if they had absolutely no interaction with the .NET technology stack: Windows Server.NET, Exchange.NET, Messenger.NET, SQL Server -- all a part of the .NET generation -- just as Microsoft declared everything in the generation before a part of the DNA vision (I still hear developers talking about "Microsoft DNA", not really sure what they're talking about).

As a developer who was heavily involved with the betas of what we call .NET today - a runtime and a framework, and the associated tools, for building next generation solutions - I really had no idea what .NET was in Microsoft parlance. Just as ActiveX got muddled into a meaningless term, .NET was being hijacked to basically mean "buy whatever is new or coming out soon".

Eventually that insanity stopped, and .NET collapsed down to a sortof virtual-machine runtime, a framework, and a set of tools. .NET 1.0 was one runtime, one framework, and Visual Studio.NET 2002. .NET 1.1 was a new runtime, a new framework, and Visual Studio.NET 2003. .NET 2.0 was a new runtime, an expanded framework, and Visual Studio 2005 (note the dropping of .NET on the naming, given that Visual Studio, as always, also makes non-.NET applications). There are countless assemblies and extension libraries available targeting each of them, and of course I can make libraries tomorrow that target .NET 1.0, .NET 1.1, or .NET 2.0, and it doesn't magically evolve them into .NET 3.0.

Well it looks like Microsoft is at it again. They've decided that Vista's technology platform, WinFX (which will be partially backported), is so great that it can't be just a set of assemblies or systems that the .NET runtime interacts with. No, it must be .NET 3.0! So now if you have the .NET 2.0 runtime, the .NET 2.0 Framework, targeting it with Visual Studio 2005, and you add in the WinFX framework...voila, you have .NET 3.0.

Insanity. Absolute, unbelievable insanity. Perhaps there's some amazing explanation -- for instance that their April Fools project ran a little long, and they just got the output out -- but I suspect it is just more of the same that we saw circa-2000. Some short-term euphoria over a gonna-be-released-soon project has them screwing with the terminology yet again.

Already the boards are full of "So....does this mean WinFX comes with LINQ?" (LINQ is one of the technologies promised for the next real wave of .NET)