Apart from this, and starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft will include the last incarnation of the .NET Framework in its flagship operating system, with all the bells and whistles that come with it. For those who like their ColdFusion environment hosted on a Windows server, this means they'll always have all the features provided in the .NET platform at hand. Even if a switch to Vista won't be an option in the near future for current projects, you may still wonder how you can put them to work for your ColdFusion application.
The promise of the next version of ColdFusion (code named "Scorpio" and due out later this year) is that it will support .NET natively. This also means that access to this platform will be of interest to ColdFusion developers, in the future anyway. Still, apart from the ability to use .NET objects directly from CFML, there are other ways of making ColdFusion and the .NET Framework talk to each other.
