It seems to me that almost all of the truly platform-dependent stuff is intentionally left out of the Framework, although hopefully MS will keep going with stuff like Windows Management Interface. I cannot believe things like formatted printing were left out of the Framework "by accident". Here's a funny MS quote:

ms-help://MS.VSCC/MS.MSDNVS/vbcn7/html/vaconCallingWindowsAPIs.htm
"Windows API calls were an important part of Visual Basic programming in the past, but are seldom necessary with Visual Basic .NET. Whenever possible, you should use managed code from the .NET Framework to perform tasks instead of Windows API calls."

... unless you want to write basic utility software...