I agree with most of your comment, and would add that there are hidden costs with choosing the windows platform that are not so obvious such as: Easier access

I agree with most of your comment, and would add that there are hidden costs with choosing the windows platform that are not so obvious such as: Easier access to support with OSS web platforms than .Net. I find OSS proponents much more open and willing to blog about difficult issues that they have solved and provide free code and workarounds. This is not as true in the .Net realm, but it is getting better. Third-party libraries/plug-ins cost money in the .Net world. Its much easier to find free IDE plugins and libraries/apis for your platform in the OSS world. in .Net the alternatives cost money usually a small amount, but it does add up. (I'm guessing because it's cheaper for corporations to spend a small amount to solve a problem than hire a dev to custom build a solution, and .Net has a large corporate install base.) However, I have to disagree with the statement about the tools and database. I gave them a try recently and actually found the experience much more pleasing than I thought... in fact going back to eclipse for work on the monday had me missing a few features in Visual Studio. I can't speak about SQL Server in a prod environment, but the db dev tools with the express version of visual studio are pretty cool. Rather than going by third person reviews, try it out yourself, you can get the web installer at http://www.microsoft.com/Web/downloads/platform.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/Web/downloads/platform.aspx and the MVC tutorial at (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-net-mvc-ebook-tutorial.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-n...) Personally I think the tutorial just proves my original point if you do work through it. Its a chapter from a book by the creators of .Net MVC and whilst free, the whole book is not, most other popular frameworks would release the full book as a free download.