I don't think that the investment in ActiveState was related to .NET. I get the impression that ActiveState's involvement in .NET is something that came about as a result of working a bit more closely with Microsoft. It benefits ActiveState just as much to provide a VS.NET plugin for Perl and to develop PERL.NET.
More information on Microsoft's 3 year investment in ActiveState can be found
here
Simon Flack ($code or die)
$,=reverse'"ro_';s,$,\$,;s,$,lc ref sub{},e;$,
=~y'_"' ';eval"die";print $_,lc substr$@,0,3;