Smart Cards, what is the new PCSC?

I see that there are third party tools and libraries available for accessing Smart Cards through PC/SC but nothing that the .NET framework specifically provides for.

What does this mean? Did Microsoft specifically reject the PC/SC specification or have they just not gotten around to incorporating it into the .NET framework? Does C# (or the .NET framework for that matter) provide any other standard for accessing Smart Cards or is writing a wrapper for the PCSC WIN32 API the way to go? By the way, there's a nice CodeProject article for doing that available here[^].

Basically, what I'd like to know is this. How would Microsoft access Smart Cards when coding in C#?