My perception so far is - It is quite possibly true, and I have noticed a strong anti-MS bias. I like and use Ruby\Rails but I have developed in .NET, and Visual Studio, C# are quality tools. VB.net is totally maligned but quite good: very English syntax w/o managing all the damn brackets.

I switched to open source because I hope to have a lot of users, thus a lot of servers. My feeling is the MS space is excellent for B to B, or internal intranet stuff, where the tight integration w Windows et al is useful and the licensing costs are moderate because of the low volume of users.