Rob, I've always enjoyed reading your posts as I've personally been straddling the gap between the two worlds (MS and OSS) for a long time now. Primarily this is due to our local job market - there simply aren't any OSS jobs where I live, and Microsoft is very deeply embedded in the New Zealand marketplace.

C# is a fine language, and ASP.Net MVC is a great framework, but I can't help but feel like the 'other kids' are ransacking the candy store while I'm out on the curb. In terms of testing frameworks and tools, the Ruby/Rails platform is lightyears ahead. I know there are attempts to bring some of the core concepts in RSpec and Cucumber to the .Net platform, but we're not there yet, and probably never will be. The goalposts are always shifting - the OSS platform can respond to change and new ideas much more quickly than the MS platform.

We have an MVC framework for web development now, but it has taken 10 years (Java Struts was released roughly around the same time as Webforms iirc)! Testing is only one element of this - in the OSS world we're also seeing an explosion of asynchronous queuing/messaging frameworks, object/document datastores, serverside js and other innovations.

I also share your frustration with the coupling of the framework releases to a new IDE. I use Vim for everything other than .Net development, and like the fact that the rug isn't going to be pulled out from under me every two years.

As a Microsoft developer it is hard not to feel envious of the OSS community. The Alt.Net community if anything appears to be shrinking, and it is presumably because those developers have come to a similar conclusion as yourself - the cost simply does not justify what the MS platform can offer.

BDD on .NET? Check out the S#arp Architecture, it's designed to be the RoR of the .NET world, and it has some nice BDD tools, plus scaffolding for IoC, Unit Tests, Services, and MVC.

http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net

I rarely seen any RoR clone took off. I don't mean to talk bad about them, but I'd be worried about the community and momentum behind them. I wouldn't want to use a niche technology to find out that I might have to extend or take ownership myself down the road when their leader decided to resign to pursue something else because they find their work no longer rewarding nor interesting (well, to begin with, they're cloning a popular framework instead of coming up with original ideas or being a visionary).

SharpArchitecture, while swell and neat, doesn't scratch the itch of "this stuff really isn't that hard". There's a metric s* ton of concepts and code in there that are more suitable for a military defense system, let alone a startup.

My point really was only part technical though. To give an example you had to switch from Silverlight for a completely nontechnical reason. It wasn't even expense related.

But you still had to switch and it still cost you time and money you wouldn't need to spend had you just gone with Flash in the first place. So the point to me is still "don't use Microsoft technology because you'll end up needing to switch"

Can't argue with that. Outside the corporate walls money is king - it's a hard truth and one I was not about to pay for personally :).

But isn't that the case with virtually any technology? We've used C, C++, Java, C#, VB, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Flash, etc... We always look at the stack and make a business and technical decision about what to keep and what to toss.

That will never change because the surrounding ecosystem is expensive as shit.

It's also very slow moving and wildly outdated.