I like .NET/Mono stuff, and I totally understand the frustration of .NET developers. I would want to point out though that Javascript does have all the feature

I like .NET/Mono stuff, and I totally understand the frustration of .NET developers. I would want to point out though that Javascript does have all the features you listed that .NET has, except the desktop stack - but of course that is precisely what Microsoft (and others, like GTK developers) may be developing. "what .NET is. It is a desktop stack, a server stack, a runtime for many languages, those many languages themselves, and countless libraries that are being actively developed" Javascript on the server: http://nodejs.org/ http://nodejs.org/ Javascript as a runtime for many languages (more than .NET even I believe at this point): https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-languages-that-compile-to-JS https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang... Countless javascript libraries: in the browser https://github.com/bebraw/jswiki/wiki https://github.com/bebraw/jswiki/wiki and on the server: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules Even .NET code can be ported to javascript via tools like: https://github.com/kevingadd/JSIL https://github.com/kevingadd/JSIL (as can java via GWT and so forth) Although of course System.Windows.Forms hasn't been ported (wouldn't surprise me if someone does though). By the way, I do educational software - we like applets and so forth. That was the main drawback to the .NET/Mono platform, from my point of view. When Silverlight was released to run .NET in the browser, that was great, but it only works in Windows, and Monolight doesn't seem to work too well as a replacement on other platforms. Now with HTML5 and canvas, it's even nicer than applets, although a bit slower (can't run a complex circuit simulation as easily, for example), plus it runs on mobile/tablet platforms of course.