While everyone, including Microsoft, is asking the question "What is .NET?", people like me are trying to use it.  As I mentioned before, minimal .NET footprint is large (just like Java) and its runtime are not shared across applications (just like Java).  Memory overhead seems to be 4 to 10 meg per application depending on the range and extent of .NET Framework the application uses.

Three common .NET hosting applications are ASP.NET, Internet Explorer, and the Shell (aka Explorer).  At least with the Shell, .NET runtime is not loaded it is used.  Shell that normally uses around 18 meg of memory ends up with around 24 meg memory foot when one of my shell extensions written in .NET is activated.  I am not too happy with this, of course, but the cost of .NET not too bad for building extensions to IE and Shell.

What does concern me is the increase in memory requirement when .NET applications become common place.  Since each application will need around addition 7 meg, .NET based MS Office suite will cost around 40 megs more if all the MS Office is running.  I usually run around 20 applications and services simultaneously, so around 140 megs of additional memory will be needed if all of them were .NET based.  I expect 512 megs will be minimal memory requirement and 1 gig recommended.  Also, GDI+ is still too slow (its not hardware accelerated) for doing anything fancy.

So we are at a point similar to the time when Windows 1.0 came out and the watershed event, equivalent of Windows 3.1, will not happen for another year or more.