As with any platform there are strengths and weaknesses. In my mind, the greatest strength of the .NET framework is the sheer number of ways you can leverage y

As with any platform there are strengths and weaknesses. In my mind, the greatest strength of the .NET framework is the sheer number of ways you can leverage your .NET knowledge to create various types of products. For example: 1. Desktop GUI applications. WPF is in my opinion the best GUI framework for Windows, and many well-known Linux GUI apps have been made with Mono + GTK. You can even create Mac GUI apps with Xamarin.Mac (with commercial support!). 2. Server/web software. ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET WebAPI, NancyFX, Suave...the list goes on for various frameworks (most of which will run on Windows, Linux, and OS X). 3. Video games. Unity is very commonly used. 4. Internet of things. You can run .NET on a Raspberry Pi, and on various other embedded devices (again, with commercial support!). 5. Mobile apps. You can write iOS and Android applications using Xamarin. In my opinion, it's the best tool to write native, cross-platform mobile apps (when considering tooling, enterprise support, etc.). Some other great points: 1. C# and F# are generally considered to be very-well designed languages that support a variety of programming styles. 2. .NET has very broad adoption in enterprise. We hear about Rails, Go, Node, Clojure, etc. here in the HN echo chamber, but in any town beyond the big cities you're far more likely to find a C# or Java job. In the next big downturn, you'll be happy to have .NET on your resume. Now of course, .NET can't do EVERYTHING. It's VM-based platform, so of course there will be applications (very low memory, for instance) for which it isn't suited. That said, from a bang-for-your-buck perspective it's a pretty tempting offer.