I'm not defending .NET against any other technology, I'm just stating that you have no idea what you are talking about. I'm not argueing on whether you can like the language or not; I'm pointing you the reasons for the existance of this language and why it is used.

You don't compare languages strictly by the size & speed of the the executables they produce. If that's how languages were determined as good ("assembly rulez") or bad ("30 mb crap of libraries"), we would all be programming in assembly, which clearly is not the case.

Who cares about C++ and VB... managed code is all about C#. You missed the point.