Typical response, IMO - A lot of professional developers use .NET and Visual Studio, create great apps and make good money - I've worked in the videogame indust

Typical response, IMO - A lot of professional developers use .NET and Visual Studio, create great apps and make good money - I've worked in the videogame industry and now at a web startup. In both instances, we have used MS development tools to varying degrees. At the game studio, we primarily used visual studio - We preferred visual studio for a lot of reasons which I dont feel like enumerating in quick post; Developing for cross platforms, VS was the best choice and supported by all first party vendors (SONY, MS, NOA). Although it might be the trendy thing to bash MS, their developer tools and support are very good - Yes, .NET libraries and API's are certainly bloated in certain areas, if so, hack it to your liking and create a smaller footprint - .NET is very flexible and is really not that hard to learn; You make it sound like learning MS technologies and other development tools/languages are mutually exclusive, when in reality anyone who has coded .NET knows that to be untrue If you are asked to learn .NET in a professional environment and your response is 'Send out my resume', I'm not so sure I would like to have you on my development team. (goes both ways I suppose, if you dislike .net so much, you should find an environment/job where you can develop to your preference) Seems like I'm a shill for MS ;) I'm not, I just think they deserve a bit more credit than they are given - in my current job we develop in a mixed mode environment with MS & LAMP (might sound weird, but it works) My 2-cents