[quote]…is there a MS marketing executive standing behind you with a gun to your head?[/quote] 
Naw…it’s just that audio aside (which .NET has zero support for), it seems .NET and JUCE duplicate much of the same functionality. Now for multiplatform support, it’s a no-brainger which to use – JUCE all the way. And JUCE, in my opinion, has nicer GUI widgets. But .NET will soon be natively supported by all windows XP machines (right now you have to download the .NET framework), and from then on a Win-only platform developer won’t incur any extra size hit for making programs that use .NET features. And because MS is throwing its gargantuan weight behind it, there are loads of third-party components written for it. A recent project I did in C#.NET, for instance, was only 200k in size but implemented a pretty complicated demonstration of how Fourier Synthesis worked including lots of graphs, tweakable knobs, and sound. (The sound part was so inelegant I don’t even want to talk about it, and forget anything approaching realtime.)
I’m not saying .NET is the best thing in the world, but for someone limiting themselves to Windows platform development, it’s got a lot going for it. I’m really excited about the wealth of functionality in JUCE, and I’m so new to both it and .NET that I could well be wrong about this (as I frequently am!) but JUCER functionality, for instance, seems to be similar to the GUI builder that writes .NET code, but .NET has an advantage in that there are huge numbers of third-party components that tightly integrate with the GUI builder and write .NET code…and if the programmer decides not to use them, the .NET framework will ship as an integral part of the new Vista OS, so .NET applications can stay quite small. It’s hard to compete with the vast hoard of Microsoft programmers for breadth of functionality…for instance, the .NET string class implements full GREP functionality. Web-based apps are also amazingly simple in .NET…the Fourier Synthesis application I wrote can be run either on the host or the client, with no changes in code…I wrote the code as if it were a standard client, but with a single radiobutton click in a compiler option have a web-based program that runs on the server. It’s not that .NET’s bits are more powerful as you kid, but just that there are a lot more of 'em.
That said, JUCE GUI’s look much, much better than stock .NET gui’s, it’s open-source so it’s easily tweakable, and many of the interfaces are either more consistantly written or else simply available, not to mention the multiplatform options. And the guy who wrote JUCE it is clearly an ethical, decent human being…to which Microsoft’s lawyers I’m sure say “no comment” :evil: .
If I’m wrong with any of this, please let me know! I’m learning all the time.