I have noticed the lack of community as well but I suppose the choice of using .Net has more to do with your goals. My company's product uses .Net and I chose t

I have noticed the lack of community as well but I suppose the choice of using .Net has more to do with your goals. My company's product uses .Net and I chose that because I know it best. I didn't really have time to learn something new when I was trying to get a product to market. It's a very marketable skill I suppose in certain companies but I've noticed that few companies I see talked about around here use it much. I mostly see interest in Ruby, PHP, and Python skills. If you want to start an open source project then .Net probably isn't your best choice. I haven't met any .Net developers who work on open source .Net projects. They work on projects in C or Python on their own but almost never C#. The C# open source projects that I've used in the past like Lucene .Net are just straight ports from Java. Lucene is a little frustrating because it doesn't take advantage of many C# features so it feels like programming Java when you're interacting with it.