Jim Murphy mentions a few interesting tidbits about what individual developers are publishing for .NET. One of his observations is "Maybe the not-so-glorious era of writing API wrappers is over".
Well, I think we're not there quite yet. Plenty of things to wrap in the Win32 API that are not covered by the framework. However, perhaps Jim's got a good point here, in the sense that the wrappers being developed for .NET are quite different in nature to those usually created in C++ just a year or two ago. Notice that most people don't just publish an isolated .CS/.CPP/whatever file, but instead go a little bit farther and publish a component: a full assembly with all necesary support. So, it's pretty much a drop in. That's pretty cool by itself. Even more interesting is that people are actually taking the time to go one step beyond simply wrapping the underlying API, but are also trying to create meaningful abstraction that fit the .NET programming model. This is even more cool, and I think this is one of the things that will make .NET even more significant as a platform.
For example, when I wrote my Managed Memory Mapped File wrapper, I made the concious decision to support reading and writing to the MMF using the Stream concept, and not simply writing embedded Read/Write methods on the main class. This is just a very simple example of what's going on.
