It's really nice being able to trace into the guts of hibernate, spring, etc to see what the heck is actually going on and fix it if it's broken. When I used to do Microsoft stuff, I'd run into bugs in the stack that I couldn't fix. This was enormously frustrating and time wasting. The typical advice given out by support was re-install or buy the latest upgrade. There were also a lot of deliberately imposed architectural limitations to prevent you from working around lack of "enterprise" features in the basic versions which were incredibly frustrating and the enterprise version pricing was astronomical.

The open-source situation at Microsoft has really improved. Source is available for a lot of their web stack, contributions are accepted, and there are some nice open-source frameworks (like Nancy, MIT-licensed, inspired by Sinatra) that run on IIS or another Owin-compatible server these days.

I generally prefer Ruby-based things myself - this post isn't trying to sway anybody to the MS side; just wanted to give a bit of credit where it's due and perhaps a bit of news to those who haven't looked over onto that side of the fence in a long time.

>If you are not willing to fix/adapt/improve the framework you are using, you better not be using ASP.NET also (try a google search on asp.net issues), of any framework at all. In fact, developing larger more complex software might not even be possible without adapting frameworks for your specific problems.

Huh what? Stack Overflow with it's extreme load works quite well with ASP.NET.

>try a google search on asp.net issues

Okay, I did, what I am supposed to be looking at?

The point is, SO almost certainly aren't using vanilla ASP.net. Nobody can succeed for too long without maintaining and cultivating their stack.

We're on ASP.NET MVC4, a stock build.

We've configured route registration a little bit specially* to speed up some common cases and we don't necessarily use every feature in the framework; but we're far from a proper fork.

ASP.NET MVC performs well enough that we get more bang from focusing on our own code basically.

*This amounts to registering our highest traffic routes _first_, and checking left-hand matches before Regex'ing (since we have a ton of "/foo/\d+/bar"-ish routes).

I don't know about Vanilla ASP.NET but they are pretty much using stock config'd IIS and Servers. So I would be very surprised if they weren't using stock ASP.NET (with their own filters, etc using public APIs I'm sure)

Forgive me, I'm not an MS person, but is there no opportunity to augment/customise/replace/mix-and-match/etc the ASP.net components?

From what I've read on http://highscalability.com and the like, they love to tweak.