Cameron Purdy has posted "Top Ten Reasons to Use .NET". From first appearances it has extremely compelling arguments.  However, I've got to say he's  wrong, on every point!

1.  You work in a Microsoft shop.  Remember last year's person/s of the year award by Time magazine, yes the whistleblowers.  If you got a conscience, you got to blow the whistle on this one!  You just can't have your company blow millions of dollars for absolutely no reason. Who knows, you could just be this year's Person of the Year!

2.   You need to work with COM or COM+ or ActiveX.  Well then why bother upgrading when VB, VC++ or Delphi  will work just fine?  Matter of fact, they're better suited, after all they're more tightly integrated with COM. Can anything be more tightly integrated to COM than C++ with ATL?

3. Your software only has to run on Windows, and it has a lot of UI.  Well nothing beats Delphi when it comes to building UIs for Windows.  Also, the problem with .NET is you've got to deploy a 20Mbyte runtime on your Windows machines, with something like Delphi you just ship the .exe, everything's self contained!

4.  You are upgrading a VB6 or VC++ app and the client machines all run Windows.  Well if all the clients run windows then one of them will be Windows 95, and there's a snowball chance in hell that its going to run .NET. Same goes with 64-bit windows, although that's not for clients, so I guess it doesn't count.

5. You have to integrate tightly with a number of Windows libraries (DLLs).  Wouldn't it be easier using plain C.  I mean it's a procedural interface, use a procedural language, using .NET is had extra overhead per procedural call and Objects just complicates matters.

6. You are upgrading an .asp-based application. Well now's the perfect time to switch to ChiliSoft's ASP, not much porting required, unlike ASP.NET, plus its written in pure Java! Because it will run in a non-Windows OS, you'll be able to upgrade your server's hardware without having to pay a license fee to Microsoft.

7. You are doing work for a client and they ask you to do .NET.  Show them "101 Reasons Why Java is Better than .NET".  They'll be so enamored that you've saved them from License 6.0, that they just might pass the savings on to you!

8. You work for Microsoft.  Now's the perfect time to pull a CrossGain.

9. You have the following business requirement: Take this COBOL, J#, C#, C++, Smalltalk, Eifel, Lisp, Php, Perl and JavaScript code and glue it all together into a single application that has a .exe extension and runs only on Windows. Standard COBOL, C++, Smalltalk, Eiffel and Lisp haven't been implemented for .NET.  PHP and Perl standard or ".NET" variant don't exist for .NET.  Absolute no chance that you'll fulfill these requirements.  Wait a minute here, you can do it with Java, just grab the respective implementations and compile it with Excelsior JET compiler!

10. Your name is tRolf.  Wouldn't changing your name be less painful?