I completely agree. You are missing out on a modern AND mature development platform using Microsoft stuff.

I second that. F* language from MS with dependent types, and compiles to F# and OCaml. I finally gave MS Visual Studio CE a try, and I am blown away. I come from an Emacs/Slime/Lisp(SBCL) on Windows, not Linux, and now that MS has open sourced a lot of it, I am going to stick with it and see if I hit any blocks. Popularity or cool are not my guides. I do have Linux and Mac OS X at home too, but I am always on my Windows notebook.

Just curious, are you deploying on Windows Server?

Don't know yet, I think it'll depend on how hard it is for me to get it running on Apache + mod_mono. Reason being, I do have a VPS with about 30 other sites (mostly Wordpress) right now.

If I can keep using my existing server for this new project, for now, then that's great. I know I'll eventually have to migrate it onto its own thing (it's a startup that is taking off, go me! :) ), but until I absolutely have to, I want to keep costs down and processes simple.

Still, if I've got to deploy to an MS-based VPS, that's certainly not the end of the world, not by a long shot. Just a different thing to learn.

If you are going to use Apache and mono there is no reason to deploy a Windows server.

IIS performance on the other hand is amazing these days, Apache really needs to find a way to use http.sys.

I do Node.js stuff in Visual Studio. It's better than anything.