Microsoft's Somarsegar announced that Microsoft has officially named WinFX to be the .NET Framework 3.0.  There has been a tremendous backlash on his blog, but I think that people are completely missing the point and mixing apples and oranges.

Some people are complaining that it should be the .NET Framework 2.x (2.5, etc.), but I think it is way too significant, and warrants a major version number change.  After all, they are folding in WPF, WCF, WF and WCS (formerly "InfoCard").  That is huge.

Some people are complaining that they should come out with the CLR 3.0 and C# 3.0 at the same time.  Absolutely not!  These are completely different products.  The framework is a utilitarian type library assisting in writing applications.  That's all it is.  It's huge and indispensable, but it is just that.

C# is a language.  That's it.  Sure, it makes essential use of the framework, but it's been rumored you can write (albiet very simple) programs without the framework (not sure I believe that, though).  Either way, you can easily use it with other versions of the framework.  Saying that C# should be 3.0 is the same as saying VB should come out with version 3.0.  Didn't that happen over a decade ago???  The first VB .NET was really VB version 7.0.

And the CLR is just the runtime environment, and independent from the framework and the language.  Sure, they all have pieces that take advantage of each other and have some built-in hooks that take advantage of one another, but it is quite clear that you can have a mix of versions running together.

Sure, you can look at Microsoft Office, and point out that they release new versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. together -- but that is packaged as a suite.  It's a different animal.

I, for one, agree with Microsoft, and it will help eliminate the confusion between WinFX and the .NET Framework -- because WinFX is really just more namespaces within the framework, and adds to our type library choices.