S. Somasegar has announced that WinFx was confusing and so they have renamed it to .NET 3.0.

I’m indifferent or its good, wierd, or bad. What?

Indifferent: It is just a name.

Good: I like the idea that WinFx == .NET 3.0. It definitively shows how these technologies relate.

Wierd: I liked the name WinFx. As one of my Digipede presentations says, WinFx is was the new Windows API. Is Microsoft saying that .NET 3.0 is the new Windows API? That is hard to believe. Will WinFS end up being in .NET 3.0 or is that something else altogether?

Bad: Does this mean that the CLR is about to have a new version number? As Jesse Kaplan told me at PDC05, the biggest compatibility problem for .NET 2.0 was the version # (oh and installs that rely on the version # or some installation artifact to detect .NET). So is this going to happen again? So soon?

So, does it all matter in the end? I don’t know . . . it probably helps Microsoft focus its branding . . . that is a good thing.