> In my experience, .NET, VB, Visual Studio (all while great tools) require you to do things one way, their way. That just doesn't sit well. To be honest, that

> In my experience, .NET, VB, Visual Studio (all while great tools) require you to do things one way, their way. That just doesn't sit well. To be honest, that's not my experience. I've found that .NET gives you a lot of freedom, however things can be indeed easier if you do things the "recommended" way, but there's also an "if that's what you want, you can do it if you think you know what you're doing" mentality as well in the design of the framework. I mean, C# even has pointers which is quite uncommon in similar high-level languages, albeit well hidden so you only get to use them if you really want to. Contrast that to Python's famous "there's only one way to do it" philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I think Python is really great stuff but I think it's unfair to say that .NET (as opposed to Ruby or Python) forces you to do things "one way, their way". If you want to do web development, you can choose between MVC and the (kind of) continuations of WebForms; imperative or functional, direct SQL, LINQ or the Entity Framework etc. - there are a lot of choices to be made.