The big picture point-of-view coming out of Redmond today is that .NET has flourished out of the gate in some areas, such as the delivery of Visual Studio .NET, which put Web services-development tools into developer hands. But Microsoft CEO Bill Gates also admitted Microsoft has stumbled very publicly in others areas, such as the company’s decision to pull back on its .NET My Services roll-out.

Overall, he gave his company a grade of “C” in its initial Web services efforts.

Indeed, Microsoft is taking some big hits from analysts and media, such as a story in today’s Wall Street Journal arguing that .NET has largely been a bust (registration required).

Certainly, the .NET rollout has been a mixed bag. But such highly-critical analysis largely miss or minimize the importance of Web services and related technologies within the enterprise, not to mention the wide adoption of its concepts almost universally among technology vendors.

Into this confused environment, Microsoft Wednesday launched some actual product?an important step in moving from Web services vision to reality.

Microsoft said its Windows .NET Server has reached the stage of release candidate 1, which means that engineering, development and beta testing has been completed and is nearing final release. Windows .NET server code will be available for download for third-party vendors this week and for customers next.

Jim Allchin, group vice president of the Platforms Group at Microsoft called .NET Server, which has suffered from numerous delays, “rock-solid.”

It had better be. Microsoft has taken many hits for the failure to keep its public Web sites and Web services?such as at its HotMail and MSN services?up and running while its Web server and e-mail clients have been the target of a slew of malicious viruses and attacks.

Windows .NET server will be the server operating system for the .NET framework and be tightly integrated into the company’s tools and applications. In addition to deeper, native Web services support, .NET Server will include expanded support for 64-bit processing, broader inclusion of eight-way clustering, and support for non-uniform memory access (NUMA).

In a related development today, Microsoft and Covalent Technologies announced a deal to more closely link Microsoft’s .NET platforms to the popular Apache Web server. The recently released Apache 2.0 was that group’s first real effort to create a Windows-based Web server. Now, users of Microsoft’s Visual Studio .Net development tools will be able to deploy apps to Apache Web servers using .NET’s ASP.Net dynamic page-creation engine.