Microsoft?s next-generation platform, the .NET Framework, offers a new language, C#, which aims to offer the power of C++ with the ease of Visual Basic. In this article, the authors consider the application of C# and the .NET Framework to real-time systems. Their performance tests show that C and C# performance is comparable in some cases. However, they show that C# is not currently suitable for hard real-time applications and should be used for firm and soft real-time applications only with care.