Personally, it's less the lack of community and more the lack of OSS adoption as a result of the lack of community that's a hindrance. .NET developers need to s

Personally, it's less the lack of community and more the lack of OSS adoption as a result of the lack of community that's a hindrance. .NET developers need to stop drinking Microsoft's Kool-Aid and explore what's out there. If nothing else, they ought to explore the major ports from the Java world (e.g. NHibernate, Spring.NET, etc.). .NET developers are effectively slaves to their tools; don't get me wrong, Visual Studio is an impressive IDE and development environment but it over-shields. It's shocking how out of their comfort zone most are with anything that does not start with the letter 'n' or end with the word 'dotnet'. I agree with the points made about economics and marketability, but, at least for me, if you want to stand out from the .NET crowd (in turn making yourself more marketable), learn something, anything, as long as it's not a first class citizen on Microsoft's stack. Become familiar with a language other than C# or (gasp!) VB.NET. Try IronPython or F#; you're still on the CLR! Learn to appreciate and leverage patterns. The Java community embraces open source, and as a result, patterns become an integral part of their vocabulary. .NET developers need to become more proficient in this realm.