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As you mentioned, the keyword is "social". .Net is a respectable platform, but all the MS stuff that comes with it is what is dragging it down. Licensing, no or extremely limited cross platform support etc. You must remember, most of the people on DZone and such are developers and as such, not given to be swayed by sites like getthefacts, or MS's glossy brochures. I am a dev, I have limited funds, FOSS tools are free, .Net is not.

The last thing a professional software company should worry about is the price of dev tools. If that is an issue, find another company.

That said, .NET is free, and you can get the express version of Visual Studio for free, as well as SQL Server Express. All of these are powerful enough to develop anything in.

I don't agree. So you are saying that any company you deem "professional" should spend money when better things could be had for cheap? That's backwards thinking to me. Actually, that is how the business people think. Ooohh, its Microsoft...shiny...it has to be good.

Bottomline is, .Net is a good platform. But it does not do anything spectacular. At least nothing that other platforms cannot do. Also, there are some (Warning: Entering religious discussion here) other issues. Like the emphasis on "easy" rather than good design that the IDE has. But that's just me.

And I really do wish people would stop pointing to the Express versions of the IDE. They do nothing. You can't be serious when you say that you can code production level code in Express versions.

You missed my point entirely.

A shop can use whatever tools it wants. However, if expense is the sole reason for a shop to avoid using MS tools, then I would be more concerned about getting my paycheck at the end of the month.

Simply put, expense is such a small figure in the grand scheme of things that it cannot be used as a real argument against MS tools. Only the hobby programmers can use it as an argument, and like I said, The express versions are more than powerful enough for them.

As far as the IDE? If Visual Studio wasn't around, something tells me there would be no Eclipse. VS has been THE industry IDE forever, and for good reason.

Agreed that a shop should do whatever it can to maximize profits. But to give you an example, at my workplace, we pay a couple of million every year in licensing fees just for the IDE. This does not include app servers, DB or anything, just the IDE. So, if a company is not taking these expenses into account, I would be more worried than if a company decided to go with a cheaper technology. In my book, expensive is not always good. Case in point, MyEclipse as compared to other IDE's.

Visual Studio set the benchmark for a good IDE back in 2000 or thereabouts. But right now, I don't think its that good of an IDE at all. It comes with so many problems, just a google search would suffice. That is not to say that VS is not a good IDE, but the industry standard, hardly.

Its the same reason why there are more PHP, Ruby blog posts and sites than there are J2EE as well. Java and ASP.NET are real platforms, and they take some time to learn, and are mostly used in enterprise size development by professionals.

The other platforms? Anyone can learn in a day, and blog about it. Doesn't mean that they, or the platform is necessarily any good.

Personally, I'm happy that I develop on a platform that isn't being blatantly abused by horrendous coders everyday *Cough* PHP *Cough*

Most .NET programmers are professional developers, some of them write quality blogs, but a lot of them are too busy making money to tinker.

Because it's owned by Microsoft and it's still considered "cool" to bash it, especially among scripting kiddies. In terms of capital invested .NET and Java are light years ahead of traditionally OSS. At the end of the day, that's what really matters - money... Making money has never been hip or considered popular, yet everybody has to do it.

In the world of money nobody gives a rats ass how cool your language is, or how many lines it takes you to write an RSS parser or what other coding masturbation you can come up with in under 1kb of code. People who want to make money simply focus on that task and do it with tools that suite them best and practice together with real world usage shows which tools are those.

Ruby and Rails are fun and I enjoy them tremendously but I'm not going to bet my livelihood on them. That's why I work with Flash and .NET.

Well said. I suppose we could start writing lots of pointless blog posts on little tricks, but in the end, isn't it more important to get actual work done?

Why not do both?

Unfortunately most of the time what we want and what we can get don't match.

Phalanger (PHP.NET), IronRuby, IronPython.. I even have WordPress running under .NET. These points are quickly becoming moot.