Charles Cook nails the point that I was after yesterday on DVDMaker, managed code, and dogfooding. Yesterday, Dare Obasanjo said:

If Microsoft believed in managed code, we would build applications using the .NET Framework. We do.

[examples omitted]

I find it surprising that people continue to think that we don't use managed code at Microsoft.

That isn't really the problem. It's not that MS doesn't use managed code - it's exactly like the example of the instant-legacy code browser that I brought up in my post - DVDMaker makes it look like they don't use managed code. As Charles said:

Four years after .NET 1.0 was released why has a fairly small scale app aimed at end-users been written in unmanaged code? This app has UI and Vista has a new set of APIs for UI, Windows Presentation Foundation. Maybe its unfair to pick on DVD Maker but this would have been an opportunity, one of possibly many, to demonstrate not only what you can do with WPF but more fundamentally that good end-user applications can be written in .NET. Many people believe that .NET is not suitable for this type of application and a new unmanaged app like this gives them more ammunition.

Exactly. This app being done in C++ is going to raise this kind of question, whether it's fair or not. This is one of those "perception is reality" issues.