I know those attitudes prevail in some shops, but that hasn't been my experience at all with the .NET community as a whole. I do choose my clients carefully, b

I know those attitudes prevail in some shops, but that hasn't been my experience at all with the .NET community as a whole. I do choose my clients carefully, but I've literally never had a client tell me that I couldn't use a third-party library that I chose, open source or not. Another data point: My posts on using jQuery to replace the client-side ASP.NET AJAX stuff got hundreds of thousands of views before Microsoft officially endorsed jQuery and began supporting it. There are tons of .NET developers out there using the best tool for the job. I think your criteria has to be who and what you're working on, not the platform. There are absolutely shops out there using Rails and Django with the same mentality that makes some Java/.NET shops miserable.