I was lucky enough to discover ASP.NET MVC a couple of days ago, and it's much, much better. I think ASP.NET is fine for internal development, but for anyone looking to build consumer sites, is it a reasonable tool? Yes, I know MySpace is on it, but when I look at PHP adoption, and use of Rails/Django, I find people are willing to try that "new hotness" but just don't like MSFT. Someone told me that they didn't learn ASP.NET because they didn't think it would help their resume (for startup type jobs - for IT it's good). Is that a generally held view/opinion?
Personally, I think that would be an immature opinion. The language you write the application in has little to do with the outcome. I know of at least one company in town who moved from Ruby on Rails to ASP.NET recently. They were looking to hire new .NET developers to convert their code.
The issue is that the stack is expensive. Windows licenses, SQL Server licenses, hosting... It all piles up, and a start up cannot afford that out of the gate. MSFT has been making strides to inject into that market. Visual Web Developer Express is a good example. They are giving the IDE away for free.
That said, for start ups, certainly a Linux based stack is far more practical. I just think that discounting an entire language or stack because the company behind it isn't 'liked' by a minority in the community is off base.
Heck, one of the lead developers of PHP quit randomly. It happens, and the community plows ahead. If ASP.NET support just died, entire industries would have to rewrite but what they had already written will still work as is. Likewise when any new version of anything comes out there are rewrites. That is just the way our industry works.
You are right though, .NET is generally considered an 'enterprisey' solution. It does however help on a resume. Usually boosts your going salary by $10k or more. ;)
That's definitely the way I see it -- hardly any startups use ASP.NET, but it's everywhere in corporate environments.
I guess it doesn't make as much sense to build your product on a platform that's controlled by a company who may either turn off support for it (eg. VB6 -> VB.NET not being backwards compatible), whereas an open source community isn't going to disappear overnight and if it does, you can maintain the platform yourself - at least in theory.
