IL provides for proper object inheritance expressible in any popular computing language. VS defines the fundamental framework for development of .Net applications. The clever compilation of IL and .Net's excellent design appear to be yielding performance superior to that of COM-based applications. It appears that .Net's fundamentals will be documented better than COM ever has been, so competition to VS will be more feasible on a technical level than it has been for the more closed products. Let's review the status of .Net's core pieces.
SOAP exists now and has been reasonably well understood for many months.
As of yet, there are virtually no shrink-wrapped applications that exploit SOAP in the way that Microsoft says will become natural once the Web replaces the desktop as the foundation of programming. Microsoft demonstrations raise security questions more than they excite prospective customers. On the other hand, SOAP 1.1 answers some of those questions. IBM and other proposal cosponsors helped rewrite the 1.1 standard in terms of the W3C's XML Schema rather than 1.0's data-typing syntax. Many different languages already support SOAP, and Microsoft's own Passport Web identity service is a SOAP server.