That's fine I guess but you will miss out on good people even though you don't think you will. The reasoning here suggests that .Net doesn't require you to do anything outside of controls and drag and drop which isn't in my experience very true at all. I've been able to some the occasional control for what I do but it's never anything fancy at all.

What platform are you using that doesn't abstract the networking stack? Network programming in C isn't that that different than in C#. The same basic concept of I/O is there and the APIs basically work the same way.

Also .Net isn't a language. I guess you are referring to C#.