This is a subjective question.
I worked in Visual Basic 6.0 before coming into the .NET space.
One thing I see that there are a lot of things, for which there is a need to deal with the Win32 API. As a Visual Basic 6.0 developer, there were a lot of limitations. .NET fixes some of the old problems however the need to rely on Win32 has not been taken care of.
Will there be anytime that there wouldn’t be the need to rely on Win32? (I guess only when .NET has support at OS level.)
I understand that domain of .NET (writing LOB applications/websites) and C/C++ is different so far.
Can .NET or any other infrastructure really make C/C++ less significant? Am I expecting too much?
EDIT: Doesn’t it look like, building wrapper over another wrapper (and bring in new set of complexities along-with it)?
It can’t go away any time soon, but in Windows, at least, new projects are going less and less with C/C++. You can even see examples of Microsoft starting to eat their own dog food.
A great example of this is the C# compiler. Currently, it is written in C/C++. The C# team is currently working on re-writing it purely in managed code. A big reason for this has to do with CAS policies in .NET. Invoking unmanaged code requires FullTrust, so compiling code also requires FullTrust. As they move over to managed code, this limitation goes away.
As more and more developers go to .NET as their development platform, we are seeing Microsoft follow suit.
Another great example is Visual Studio 2010. They are re-writing large portions of the IDE using WPF and MEF so that it is easily extensible.
Next, look at the Silverlight runtime. It doesn’t rely (specifically) on Win32 at all. It runs on a Mac just as well as it runs on Windows. As Silverlight becomes more capable, we may find many of the .NET calls that currently rely on Win32 no longer do so.
I guess my point is that we ARE starting to see some changes in the Windows world at least.
Of course, as soon as you need to be more cross-platform, C/C++ becomes more appealing again…