I'm building two startups on .NET. Mine is http://snapleague.com http://snapleague.com a freemium recreational sports league web site builder. For my day job I'

I'm building two startups on .NET. Mine is http://snapleague.com http://snapleague.com a freemium recreational sports league web site builder. For my day job I'm working on http://screenfeed.com http://screenfeed.com which is all .NET on the backend (the main APIs are ASP.NET MVC). I've got another product in the works that's ASP.NET MVC as well. I ended up here starting back when I got VB3 for a birthday present in high school (actually if you go back further, I started programming with BASIC on an Apple in middle school). When the web came around that translated in to ASP/VBScript and then around the time .NET 2.0 came out I switched to C# and haven't really looked back. So far, the framework hasn't limited what I want to accomplish. That may not always be the case, but for now I'm satisfied with it. I'll echo what nkohari said about licensing. BizSpark helps a lot, and you can easily use MySql and the like if you don't want to pay for MS SQL Server. SQL Azure might relieve some of the pricing pressure for SQL too. Speaking of Azure, I really like it. It's completely intuitive if you've done any ASP.NET development. The only problem is that it is trailing about 6-12 months behind the other cloud app hosting options in features. And since SQL Azure was announced there's been far less emphasis on Azure Table Storage which is a shame. The querying capabilities for table storage are ABYSMAL. It needs to be on par with SimpleDB before I could see myself using it (and I really, really want to use it). I was contemplating jumping ship before ASP.NET MVC came out since the previous versions of ASP.NET (known as Webforms) really hindered more complex web app development. MVC is awesome though. Almost every part of the framework is swappable so if you have a specific need, you can quickly swap in your own or an OSS implementation. ASP.NET MVC + Spark View Engine is pure hotness. There's been a shift going on inside Microsoft's DevDiv too. ASP.NET MVC is open source, jQuery is shipped with Visual Studio, MS employees are active bloggers and twitterers, etc. And speaking of Twitter, there's a strong .NET community there.