Agreed, and if anything they want people working with .NET even if they don't control it. Their evangelists even encourage use of Mono, MonoTouch, etc. They enc

Agreed, and if anything they want people working with .NET even if they don't control it. Their evangelists even encourage use of Mono, MonoTouch, etc. They encourage open sourcing, and it's gradually becoming more and more common to see C# code on GitHub. MVC allows any number of combinations of community-sourced components rather than use EF/Razor/etc. Meanwhile, we're buying their tools and using their languages in the enterprise, where the real money is. As a .NET developer for a decade now, I'm perfectly happy with the platform and tooling; it's the best of its kind. The OP complains about EF, MVC, and other libraries, but honestly they are some of the best designed platforms out there. There are always some kinks, but who has used Ruby on Rails without having to make some significant workarounds or hacks to get it running? No platform can anticipate everything. Meanwhile, clients need to install only one package to make everything in the stack work. Compare to rubygems.