Jump ship and do it soon! Firstly some background: I'm a solution architect in the UK who deals with .Net 90% of the time and has done for the last 10 years i.

Jump ship and do it soon! Firstly some background: I'm a solution architect in the UK who deals with .Net 90% of the time and has done for the last 10 years i.e. since day one. It was a bad decision to go down this route for me. I'd have been better off with Java/J2EE. Why? Confidence. MS has pretty much no direction with respect to their development tools roadmap and ideals. They seem to put feelers out in every direction, then cut a few directions off randomly based on how people react. That's bad if you've bet your business or career on it. They only do this because they have the cash. Examples of their current creepy tentacles which are at risk: PHP, Silverlight, Hadoop, even Java on Azure, Entity Framework, Metro. Complexity. Everything is utterly overcomplicated. I am referring to the W products. WCF covers most of the "virtually impossibly overspecced" WS-* specifications which are pretty much never used in the real world (most companies use hack jobs for integration TBH). WPF and WWF are simply slow to build software with, induce horrid levels of coupling and untestability and have an extremely high learning curve for even simple tasks. I won't even mention Win32 if you have to go that low - it's an utter minefield. High rate of crap employees. Seriously, I have interviewed at least 200 already employed people over the last 10 years in this sector. I've hired about 10. That's how low the bar is for getting in. It's damn hard to get rid of people once you've hired them in the UK as well so you have to be careful. Churn rate. Utterly obsolete and expensive training (some of which is just completely wrong), no reliable roadmap, new platforms every 5 minutes to tie you into their product ecosystem and proprietary and illogical ways of doing things. Once you're in, it's hard to get out. People don't treat you with respect if you want to switch out of that side of the industry as they know about the "high rate of crap employees" as mentioned above. Also .Net software houses are usually a monoculture so it's hard to prove experience in something else, even if half your kit is Linux. Lack of out of box solutions or free solutions. Everything is pay pay pay or build build build. If you want to integrate with Word documents, pay. If you want to integrate SVN with your IDE, pay. That is pay per server, per seat, per user, per atom if they could. If you want to wire X up with Y then you'll have to write your own shims. With the Java/Ruby/Python ecosystems, everything you need is out there for nothing - it just needs assembling. Patterns and practices team. They are a joke. Utter mess. Nothing coherent, cohesive or useful come out of them. They don't even compare to the J2EE blueprints layed out back in 2002 which are pretty darn obsolete. Most of their own products ignore the P&P team's advice as it's shit. Now this may sound like bitterness or diatribe but this is how it really is. I carefully avoid mentioning the language above which is irrelevant - it's the ecosystem that's fucked.