Is C# really the most important thing?
ZDNet | at | by Mike
Maybe because of its catchy, musical name, C# is getting most of the attention during the ECMA ruminations. But remember that the common language infrastructure (CLI) is part of this deal--and maybe ultimately the more significant part. The programming language is, of course, the key element for application development, but the CLI holds the key for running those applications on diverse platforms.
As something of a sideshow to its ECMA endeavor, Microsoft also enlisted the aid of Corel to develop a "shared source" implementation of C# and the CLI that will run on FreeBSD. This, Microsoft hopes, will demonstrate that C# and CLI are not only industry standards, but can also deliver on the write once, run many paradigm.