I recently had a chance to attend a great talk given by the Program Manager for the Windows Server platform Iain McDonald. Among the things he talked about was the new Core offering in the 2008 Server platform.

Basically Microsoft will release a server operating system without all the distractions and bloat found in the regular wrapping, and without a graphical user interface. (You had better brush up on Window Power Shell). Chiefly this will reduce the attack surface of the platform.

What became clear though, is that the initial release of Core will not  support the .Net framework, nor can it be used as a asp.net featured web server. 

Iain says the .net framework will definitively be added to Core at a later state, but it will not be added as a service pack. I guess that means we will have to wait till at least 2009/2010 before asp.net web farms can run Core.