I am impress by the devotion to a specific technology that some people have. The fight for individualism in order to separate themselves from others; to feel special, and smarter than most. The "I am a Linux guy, because 98% of the computers use Windows" attitude. There are some of you that argue that CGI is better than ASP, dude CGI was not even made for the internet, and therefore it had to be patched to work for it. ASP was built for the internet and therefore can do more with better performance. I know you disagreed with me, I have a Linux friend of mine that rather to use a text file as a data store instead of SQL Server 2000 just because is made by Microsoft. If CGI is better than ASP than why is asp the most popular server side scripting language? What defines a great developer? The ability to use the best/latest/faster technology out there to create solutions. I use java, CGI, C, C++, MySQL, Oracle, SQL server, Visual Basic, vbscript, asp, C#, asp.net and others. Why I am not an anti-microsoft? Or anti-linux or anti-Java? Because it is not about me! Is about the user and the buyer. I am just a developer/programmer I am not here to convince or to try to force my religion-like believes about what my favorite computer language or operating system. Bottom line there is no only solution out there. Microsoft windows is not the best for everyone, Linux is not the best for everyone, Mac is not the best for everyone, Java is not the best for everyone, Visual Basic.Net or C is not the best for everyone. How about doing what a developer should do, “Analyzing System Requirements and defining its solutions?” this consist on asking yourself, “Who is the end user? What OS do they use? What do they need to do? How long will it take? Are they willing to fund this?” Every system have its weakness and strengths; every system weakness is defined by its strength. How? Linux it does not have many crap running in the background, which makes it a great candidate for a web server. Now tell a 15 year old kid that plays lots o video games on his computer that linux is better, that he should give all his game for an open source version of pacman. Tell a graphic artist that he should give his MAC for an open source drawing tool in linux. Sometimes better is not the best solution. How about telling a company to replace all their data and application using it because MySQL is better than MSAccess and you hate Microsoft.

About your analysis let me twist it a bit in order to make my point.

1. Run Multiple Versions of the VM (Runtime) on the Same Machine

Do I need to run multiple runtimes? Why? Do I have multiple processors? How will having multiple runtimes affect memory and can objects and resources be shared among runtimes? And the reason why Microsoft uses other technology is because they believe that they can learn from other companies. The CLR is an example of this. Don’t you see the similarities of between them? Before people would complain about the benefits of a runtime and how Microsoft didn’t have one, now they do and you still complaining. I can also twist this if I would hate C or Java, When their run time heap needs to create an object and allocate memory it must run through a linked list of objects, looking for a block of memory large enough for the new object. With the .net there is no such thing because the managed environment maintains a reference to these blocks resulting to faster object creation. Also the garbage collector in .net that destroys objects that are not being use by any application or code. Can we agree that most of the bugs are memory related? Isn’t this a good feature?

Large Innovative Open Source Community This one is the most famous affirmation of anti-Microsoft people. Here is a fact; there are thousands of websites offering free code to make applications try typing “asp free code” you can get anything you want like that. Now, don’t blame a company that wants to charge for a fully documented web control $100.00 for a license fee in order to save you from spending $20,000.00 paying a developer to figure out how to use an open source free control that you cannot get support if things go hell wire. Don’t ask yourself if Open source is beneficial, everyone can agreed that it is, ask yourself to who it is. I dough a company that needs an inventory software that works on their access databases cares if you use an open source system if it takes you 10 times more than if you would just get an out of the box solution.

Low cost Commercial Quality IDE's This one is totally unacceptable, $500? Visual studio is an editor; you should now that you can program any application on the .net framework using notepad or any text editor. Visual studio is an editor that helps you do things faster, same way Dreamweaver helps you create tables and html tags. It is optional you don’t have to buy it. And I you want a great editor for asp.net and the .net framework here http://www.asp.net/Default.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1 … yes for free…. Wow.. how can this be? On the other hand I use VisualStudio.net because I can work faster. Cause time Is money and developers always work under dead line. I am not trying to save myself $500.00 bucks and take 10 times longer developing a solution.

More Available Jobs This one I agree with you. Since open source can be at purposely design in a way that will require a lot of expertise to understand and get it to work, simple things like installing linux can take a professional to do so, while anybody can install windows. I love your comparison, Jobs availability between Java and C#. How old is Java? Many years. How old is C#? Less than 2; isn’t obvious that an older technology should have higher job demand? Why don’t you compare it with Visual Basic, considering that all asp application are Visual basic script, all Microsoft product like access and excel support it? It is very easy to compare 2 technology without considering the factors.