Were? In case you haven't noticed. .Net is cross platform now. And it was M$ who created C# in the first place. And they still update it. Its now on version 7. C#/F# and .Net are so good, that Xamarin did their own open source implementation called Mono for it.
Managed DirectX (directx .net implementation) is gone and nobody ever used it. It was superseded by XNA. Which is also gone. Whatever is in use now will be gone when XBOX One goes away and new xbox will sell you new technology.
And "regular" Net is not cross-platform. Net core is, which conveniently omits the whole windows forms gui thing, because with that being cross platform, Microsoft would start losing Windows sales.
Microsoft's C# is used almost nowhere in gamedev industry, except in editor GUIs and such. Probably 90% of C# in circulation is coming from Unity's mono integration, which is based on .NET 2.0 from ten years ago.
Bottom lines still is, that the days when Windows was sold as retail, is over. Yes, it still sells on the shelve today. But it's fading into an as-service model already. In two or three years, Windows 10 may be for free! Provided of course, that the Windows Store makes enough money.
Free windows won't happen. Ever. It will be replaced by Windows 11. Not because Windows Store being success or not, but because most MS customers don't give a sh!t about Windows store. Government agencies, companies, institutions, etc. It's where their profit is.
And Windows store will be gone in five years just like Xbox Live, Windows Mobile, Zune, blahblah. And then they will start selling another, "better" store technology, that's locked to Win 11 ofcourse. The whole store thing is just throwing sh!t at the wall and seeing if it sticks, ten years after Apple, Valve and Google did it. But their bread and butter is and will always be - selling licenses and technologies to business and xboxes to the people.
Can you imagine MS abandoning billions of certain extortion money from license sales in favor of selling games on app store?
And even then, where would people play those store games? On their desktops? How much does Mac App store make in sales and how much does Steam on Mac make? Would you abandon your Steam library that's the same since day one in favor of Microsoft newest flame that will be abandoned in a few years? There is your answer. Almost nobody uses their PCs anymore for entertainment, and when they do, they use Steam.
And iOS and Android app stores are completely irrelevant here, since, well, Microsoft utterly failed in mobile hardware sales and development. (hi Nokia!)
In case nobody noticed it here, because everybody is using Linux. Windows 10 ain't pure 10. It's a stitched hybrid of 10 AND 7. There is still a lot to do left. Like unify the user interface, and ditch the 7 elements.
You'll see all of that in Windows 11 (or Windows NT 10.1 or whatever). But you'll have to buy it first.
In the meantime, C++ is growing faster than ever with each new standard, AMD is opensourcing GPU technology left and right, someone somewhere (I'm betting on certain fat bastard's minions) is reverse engineering DirectX, and CPU and GPU cores are multiplying like bunnies.
The cold war between MS and Valve started few years ago, it's just no one has incentive to heat it up just yet as both are locked in a M.A.D. situation. We'll se what comes first - successful MS app store or successful port of DirectX 9/10 to SteamOS. Both seem impossible at the moment.
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