It's not that it is only ever used for enterprise, just that it seems to be mostly used for enterprise. Think of the licensing costs for visual studio, sqlserver and windows server. Sure there is the Bizspark, but it runs out, and I think most founders would be squeamish with the potential business-technical debt that would represent.

At least right now, MS is still seen (although less lately) like the Big Bad, so giving them money to use what you can get for free or near-free elsewhere seems uncool and like bad business sense.

I suspect too from my own extremely limited sample size that .NET developers make more money on average than the average of the other languages, so that is also a liability when looking for talent when you have limited cash.

Actually, in my experience, I'd say that while .NET is used in enterprise, it's mostly used by small businesses. My experience is mainly within .NET based CMS's, and I've worked for a few agencies and startups that build on .NET, sometimes amongst other things.

I've never really bought the argument that building for .NET is too expensive. Yes, it's a lot more expensive than free, but for a company it's peanuts when it guarantees the company a stable platform and a growing dev market. The only people that will be priced out are bootstrappers. I've built more small-business sites on Umbraco than I can count.

I worked professionally on VS Express for quite a while. Yes it's less convenient, but it can be done. Still a better IDE than (say) NetBeans. I know it's apples and oranges, but I'm speaking about an overall impression.

You should check out Intellij. http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

I think its free version is still better than most paid VS editions. The $500 edition is the best IDE I've seen. And it supports basically every language but the three .NET languages.

I know, it's very good. I use Android Studio and PHPStorm, both are mutations of Idea.

"Think of the licensing costs for visual studio, sqlserver and windows server."

Think of the costs of paying your developers. Those things are a pittance compared to the cost of hiring and retaining good developers.

Shrug, your costs might be different, but 13k per developer per year is hardly a pittance compared to my salary. I'd much rather have 13k in my pocket or in awesome stuff like monitors, desk, keyboard, etc.

In what world are you paying 13k per developer for year to use Microsoft products? Top of the line MSDN sub is like ~3k, and we get good desks and monitors and keyboards and computers too. Most places don't even buy MSDN, I do fine with a <1k in software to develop on .NET.

I got that price right off their site, top line Ultimate (only slightly less feature rich then Intellij IDEA) clocks in roughly $12500 more than IDEA.

http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/how-to-buy-vs

Then most drop another couple hundred to make it actually have some of the cool Intellij IDEA features by adding in Resharper. I'm not trying to hate, I use VS at work, just I can see why it's not a popular startup ecosystem.

I don't know how that price is arrived at but it's totally not realistic. I would expect to spend ~1.5K on VS2013 Professional plus associated dev. tools (R#, dotTrace etc).

Just yesterday morning (oh the timing) I shook my fists in rage after discovering the long awaited Fakes system for mocking static functions is only available in the Ultimate edition. An actual language feature, restricted to the 13k edition. Shrug, I had that in php 5 years ago...

What I don't get is: if people aren't even buying the top line IDE to use all its features, and are just buying the crappy subset IDEs, why use .NET at all? Where's the value proposition over Java/Scala? It runs on fewer architectures, the language is only mildly better than Java and certainly not better than Scala, and the long promoted IDE has less features and is exorbitantly overpriced. I just don't get it. Is it just inertia at this point? The question in my mind isn't: "why are so few startups using it?" It's "why is anyone still picking that as their business's main stack?"

I know my team is currently locked in to agreements with other companies who require it (naturally). So when a new customer wants our stuff, they have to handle it. Is that the main reason? Everyone using it is in a circle of dependence?

Oh I forgot to mention, the functionality of Fakes used to be free, but in the new iteration it no longer is, so they can squeeze a few more 13k editions.