While many of you haven’t yet migrated to .NET Framework 2.0 due to corporate policy or other reasons (this was shown by a poll we recently conducted on the forums), MS surprised all of us. (Drumroll, please) Meet .NET Framework 3.0, former WinFX! Yes, they decided to rename it that way. Nothing new in functionality, all the technologies are inside (WPF, WCF, WF, and WCS - Windows CardSpace, former InfoCard, yet another name change, though not that revolutionary). Just a weird marketing move intended to… I just cannot find an applicable reason for that. I personally liked the name WinFX (same as the codenames Avalon and Indigo by the way), but it’s not the most important thing. As you know, WinFX is based on .NET Framework 2.0, so it will actually appear that .NET Framework 2.0 will be the core of .NET Framework 3.0 which sounds confusing. And CLR and other core components of .NET Framework 3.0 will stay 2.0! Some kind of version and component mess…
I was looking forward to .NET 3.0 as a great innovation supposed to arrive in several years, delivering some great features like C# 3.0 with support of LINQ and new development environment. I really hope they will change their mind because IMHO this renaming is the most confusing and illogical move since they introduced .NET.
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/06/09/624300.aspx