Well, mine is just one voice, but as someone who's worked for a startup running on the Microsoft stack (ASP.NET 3.5) I can tell you that there are a lot of "coo

Well, mine is just one voice, but as someone who's worked for a startup running on the Microsoft stack (ASP.NET 3.5) I can tell you that there are a lot of "cool" libraries out there available for only $799! And there's a lot of cheap labor available overseas to knock out those little side features and tasks for you, all you have to do is drop their code in, then spend a bunch of time trying to make it actually work. And there's Microsoft BizSpark, so you don't have to pay for your software <whisper>until later</whisper>. Oh, and servers...err...yeah they're expensive, sorry, there's no way to spin that one. Just from my experience, .NET as a platform for startsups can be made to sound really good by the people selling it, and there are some startups out there doing it and making it work for them, to which I say good on ya! But from my experience, it ends up being the boat anchor weighing you down. There are a TON of developers available, but finding good ones can be very difficult. Hosting is expensive (compared to linux-compatible solutions), and third party components are plentiful and expensive, and usually still require a fair amount of work to integrate. My boss at my last job used to say "how can we make this faster? Why is everything so slow?" Well, because you started with a code base written by people who aren't really passionate about software development, they just took your specs and spit something out, so it gets the job done, but just barely. Then you bolted on a bunch of fancy UI components and ajaxified some stuff to give it the appearance of being less slow (oh, and look how pretty your GumDropGridView is!) Cram all of that into the cluster (f*ck) of servers in your server closet and you had a webapp you could start charging people to use. Now you've hired me and you want me to tell you how to make it faster? Well, it can be done, but we've got a lot of work to do. What's that? You've got 3 months worth of funding left? Dude, what do you want me to say?