[natem345]

The Metro APIs are all based on the old Win32 APIs & COM. Sure .NET is supported, but it's certainly not the dominant language nor was it a nice clean break as they could've done. Plus they've killed XNA and told people to switch their games from C# to C++ (especially on WP8).

[seanmcdirmid]

WinRT is actually kind of neat: they've taken what were before .NET-only APIs (like WPF), wrapped them in some sort of reference counting technology, and made these APIs callable from C++ code in a fairly easy ways. Reference counting does seem like its displacing garbage collection a bit, but that was true for iOS also. C# interoperates transparently.

I'm a MS researcher but I don't speak for Microsoft. That being said, I'm a big fan of SharpDX and MonoGame for my personal projects. They work well enough that I have avoided going native. Ya, I'm still a bit miffed that this isn't supported out of the box, but in practice its easy to work around.