Hi Jeff,
We do have a business case other than cross-platform. One of our .Net web application runs in the Azure cloud with SQLAnywhere as the backend.
We are using the Auto Scale feature. Azure creates a new web roles(PAAS) on demand (Creates a new windows machine and deploys the application on the fly and adds to the cluster).
Since .NET provider requires native dl'ls from the Sybase Anywhere client, we have to bundle the client installer as part our package. The installer is failing at times causing Auto-Scaling very difficult.
Having a fully managed .NET provider will eliminate the need of installing the SQLAnywhere client on the new windows machines created on the fly.
Thanks
Venkat