Do Shared Windows Hosters Actually Like Windows Technology

There seem to be strong forum rules in place about the kinds of posts that hosters can make.

But from my perspective it is somehow leaving a large gap in useful information I would like to know that I can't quite put my finger on right now.

So I would like to get responses from Windows hosters in this thread without violating any forum spam guidelines and I sure hope I'm not wasting my time here with this concept but here goes...

So, the topic:

Ultimately, the thing Windows Web Hosters are providing is the delivery of information that has been constructed by developers using program code they have assembled using a large array of mostly .NET technology.

The reason the Hoster is providing Windows hosting is that a sufficiently large enough population of Web Developers have been attracted to some aspect of the Windows technology stack.

And there is certainly lots of innovative and interesting technology that attracts developers to focus on .NET in just the same way that there is also interesting technology in the Linux world.

So here's the problem. It appears as if the Windows hosting companies with the odd exception have almost no interest in Windows and .NET technology.

But if they actually did have such an interest, it is not clear how they would communicate it for discussion here at WHT because of the spam rules and of course trying to communicate anything at all about hosting on the general internet is just swamped by spam. The noise level is just insane!

So I am hoping that such a discussion can take place in this thread by asking some very specific questions:

1. What interesting Microsoft technology have you researched, tested or played with lately?

2. What programs or scripts have you personally developed lately to investigate .NET 3.5 features?

3. What do you think of XBAP delivery from the net and why do you think it hasn't caught on in a larger way since it sure delivers a richer client experience than Flash or even Silverlight.

4. What do you think of Azure and will Microsoft let hosters be part of the cloud anytime soon? Can you think of useful or interesting Azure mashups from a hosting perspective?

5. Have you tried any totally silly and insane things with the .NET runtime inside of SQL Server 2005/2008 that would give your DB guys a heart attack?

6. Have you tried out the Google systems where you give your employees 20% of company time to play around with personal projects like this?