I used .NET for quite a few years, and was very happy with it. As much as people malign VB.NET, it provided the perfect path for me as an amateur-turned-professional developer - Access VBA -> VB.NET -> C#.
But over time I switched over to web development, and ASP.NET was just bad. The very nature of it - trying to replicate state with WebForms - was fine for intranets and internal tools, but an absolute disaster when working on a public web site. And it was a long time before ASP.NET MVC came along to try to tidy all of that up.
I remember discovering Nancy.fx (http://nancyfx.org), a perfect-looking, light-weight web framework. But I could never persuade anyone to use it - in my experience .NET shops lean heavily on using the accepted MS way of doing things unless you really, really don't have to. You could see that in the .NET community - open source, community-driven libraries just weren't a big thing. That frustration led me to trying out Node, and I never really looked back.
I miss working with C# a little, and sometimes wonder what the world would be like if MS had embraced open source earlier. Right now I'm writing TypeScript in Visual Studio Code - it isn't difficult to imagine that I could still be writing C# if MS had worked at creating a community around it, but alas, it never happened.
NancyFX is fantastic. I started using it a few years ago, after we switched off of IIS to the self-hosted OWIN web server stack for a couple of projects, and MVC was not (maybe still isn't?) supported there.
But over time I switched over to web development, and ASP.NET was just bad. The very nature of it - trying to replicate state with WebForms - was fine for intranets and internal tools, but an absolute disaster when working on a public web site. And it was a long time before ASP.NET MVC came along to try to tidy all of that up.
I remember discovering Nancy.fx (http://nancyfx.org), a perfect-looking, light-weight web framework. But I could never persuade anyone to use it - in my experience .NET shops lean heavily on using the accepted MS way of doing things unless you really, really don't have to. You could see that in the .NET community - open source, community-driven libraries just weren't a big thing. That frustration led me to trying out Node, and I never really looked back.
I miss working with C# a little, and sometimes wonder what the world would be like if MS had embraced open source earlier. Right now I'm writing TypeScript in Visual Studio Code - it isn't difficult to imagine that I could still be writing C# if MS had worked at creating a community around it, but alas, it never happened.