API's?!!!!!!!!!!

[Crunch]

Well yes and no - the .NET Framework makes many tasks much simpler than doing the same thing via API calls, but on the other hand there are a whole bunch of things built into the Framework that are new and would be impractical to write from scratch.

DataSets are a very good example that I can think of. I do certain things with DataSets that I doubt were intended originally, but I can't imagine a way of getting them done using another programming technique that would be ANYWHERE NEAR as easy. Maybe it's a bad programming technique, but how else could you get the effect of unbounded, jagged, queryable arrays with pretty flexible triggers, without installing SQL Server or some crap? I'm sure there are other ways to get the same effect but I'm not skilled enough to even imagine them, let alone write them. But DataSet offers a very solid and extremely functional "black box" that my applications can use on any platform that has .NET Framework installed.

PS: Yes much of what the Framework does "under the hood" is done through the Win32 API.