dotnet was a (succesful) effort of M$ to make it difficult to port apps to other os, as directx. And with continuous obsoleting of old visual studio and dx versions, software houses are almost obliged to upgrade. IMHO dotnet is used just in a very small part of autocad, but that small part makes it impossible to run it without. I remember when Autocad 2005 came out, the only *really* buggy part was the new layer manager, one of the few dotnet parts. And it's slower than its previous counterpart.... I guess it was just a dotnet coding exercise for autodesk programmers. IMHO that's a (not so) subtle kind of monopoly. Max
