Microsoft definitely has a lot of the "hey try this new thing" going on, but the key difference is I don't have to painfully upgrade all of my ASP.NET 2.0 applications when ASP.NET 3.0 or 3.5 comes out. Sure those support new features, but they are usually 99% compatible with the old versions (I believe they deprecate over two versions for the things that do change). Also if I look for code on the web, it's usually valid for any version (with the exception of LINQ).

Yeah, but ASP.NET sucks. Don't get me wrong, it was great in 2001 when it was released, but the Viewstate/Postback model really sucks judging by modern standards and it was a really bad idea when viewed in perspective.

And ASP.NET MVC is different and whatever compatibility it has with ASP.NET is actually hurting, IMHO. I mean, here's a framework with potential, but it has to carry the old bagage of ASP.NET from the start.

I get it that a framework like Rails moves TOO FAST for its own good, but nothing compels you to upgrade right now. Lots of people are still on Rails 2.3, it's a stable and reliable version and if you'll look around many projects have 2 branches, one for 2.3 and one for 3.0. And some of the projects, especially Rack middleware, don't need 2 branches.

It kind of sucks from one perspective - the 2.3 branches are going to receive less patches/upgrades, but you have the source code. If something really important is missing, or there's some unfixed bug, you can go ahead and fix it yourself.

You can't say the same thing about a binary DLL. I remember when I first tried out ASP.NET 2.0 - it contained an annoying bug related to their CSRF protection (if you clicked any control before the page loaded, it triggered an error since the CSRF token was getting loaded right before the </form> tag, at the end of the page), and it took a service pack and 2 months to get it fixed.

There is much, much MFC code written 15 years ago that still compiles without any changes today, with the latest versions of MFC. There is much to be said about Microsoft, but their development tools are top notch and robust, and for the long haul. There are MFC books that came out in 1998 and are still useful today because they contain the nitty gritty on what people ran into back then. Rather than changing everything, requiring much code to be updated, the issues are documented and people work around it. Is this nice? No, it's not, and I hated it when I was less experienced. Now, I love it - the time I spend learning them has paid off a hundred times over.

On the other hand, I've used web frameworks (mostly Symfony but also a few others) that look awesome in the beginning, but that require major changes when an update needs to be made a year later, because the latest and greatest has changed and the old is no longer supported. And they all support 'plugins', but you're fucked when you use them - sometimes they're upgraded, sometimes not, but when you use a couple you're always stuck; you need to upgrade the framework to use the latest version of one plugin, but another one only works with the old version, so now you need to replace all uses of that plugin with another, and change all the code...

Anyway that was a tangential rant, but Microsoft is really good at keeping a stable dev env, as long as you don't always use the first version of their new shinies (Windows Forms, ...)