Is there any future?

Originally Posted by ssb

I cannot stand Microsoft when they try to push developers to move to a platform inferior in terms of performance.

The gain in productivity greatly outweighs the loss in performance, assuming you're not developing a realtime system. But then again, if you were developing a realtime system, you should know not to use Windows to begin with since it's not a realtime OS.

In response to peleon's original question (what language(s) to learn other than x86 ASM), I would recommend C and C#.