I was hoping for more. And I was totally blown away. There's sophisticated role-based security at every level and performance improvements of 300 percent. Classes created in just about any language can be inherited and extended in other languages. The Common Language Runtime provides advanced compilation, security, memory management, exception handling, version control and interoperability, no matter which supported language you choose to program in.
NET provides a lush, new language-agnostic programming and debugging environment.
Visual XML tools automatically turn data into objects. Future versions of SQL Server will be deeply integrated with the language runtime to let you add procedures, triggers, functions, and even data types written in any supported language. These code assemblies will be stored inside the database, with full participation in security, backups, query optimization, and debugging. The Internet has turned out to be a magnificent dragon. Every piece of software written now must be prepared to run 24X7 and to handle thousands of users.