Is Microsoft ditching .NET in favor of JS?

The first thought from a lot of devs might be "oh no, you can't break the html/js abstraction -- this is ASP.NET all over again". I'd argue its completely different. ASP.NET tried to abstract/create server side state. And with this tons of issues crept into the abstraction. With clientside technology, these abstractions are what we've always done, whether macro assemblers, C compilers, JVMs, Lisp interpreters. I've long argued that JS should be abstracted (and honestly I'd prefer a bytecode, but that's a seperate story) -- here's to hoping they've done it (and of course languages like CoffeeScript and Script# have gone a long ways towards it already).

This stuff keeps coming around.

One does wonder why MS think they can outdo Google Chrome OS and HP/Palm WebOS at this though - still a native API for JavaScript is a cool idea although I wonder how that fits in with the "sand tray" security model.