C# needs .Net, not vice versa
ZDNet | at | by Mike
Microsoft announced .Net and C# around the same time, in late June of last year. They volunteered both C# and parts of .Net (the Common Language Infrastructure or CLI) to the same technical committee in ECMA. Since the pasts of .Net and C# have been intertwined, one might think that their futures will be too, but this isn't necessarily the case. C# could fail as a language and .Net could still succeed, but if .Net fails in the market as a platform C# will certainly fail.
This is a good thing, even as Microsoft sees it, although I doubt they would put it quite that way. One of the central characteristics of .Net is that it supports multiple programming languages. Maybe C# is an especially good programming for .Net, but it doesn't matter; if you don't want to use C#, you can still write code for .Net using almost any other language.