I am sure I'm not the only person who has postponed projects in anticipation of .NET 2.0 (or at least Beta 2's Go Live License [not to be confused with Adobe GoLive]). I have been impacted but Kent Tegels is correct in pointing out that ISVs and framework developers/development communities are hurt the most by Microsoft's dangling carrots in Whidbey. Many smaller projects have worked to bring .NET vNext features to vNow but larger projects (with timeframes that would cross years) suffer because Microsoft will have things built-in and free later, why spend 6 months developing that feature now?
"We'll just wait for vNext" is not a good answer but it is hard to convince people (even myself) of that when MS continuously answers so many questions, comments, and complaints (even critical bug reports) with "wait until you see the next version!" When that 6-month delay turns into a 2 year delay, we all see the error of our ways. I, for one, don't plan on being fooled like that again. Even if I was fooling myself.
[UPDATE: as I deleted the 50+ spam comments left overnight on this blog, individually, taking 3 clicks and pageloads per delete, I remembered how well .Text fits the "just glue it" vNext paralysis. As the .Text source code has grown dust over the last 13 months, .Text users have been eagerly awaiting the addition of the features that all blogging systems need. The updates (coming in .Text v1.0) were due in what, July? It is now Feb and .Text has become part of another product that is due (drumroll, please) "very soon". In the meantime, .Text has become the oldest, most outdated, and my least favorite of the blogging systems I use. .Text is open sourced but last Feb, we thought we could make it a few more months without the additional features .Text was lacking. Had we known it would be over a year, we probably would have done more improvements ourselves. .Text is now the blogging component of CommunityServer and is due very soon... I'm guessing we'll see an announcement on the CommunityServer::Blogs blog]