Umbraco is a good program but it costs over a thousand dollars just to get started and thousands to maintain. One of the core advantages Wordpress and other sim

Umbraco is a good program but it costs over a thousand dollars just to get started and thousands to maintain. One of the core advantages Wordpress and other similar programs have is the hobbiest programmer/designer building plug-in after plug-in to keep the application on the cutting edge. The price of this application keeps it out of the hands of the people who improve it. How many design template sites are there for Umbraco? Now how many are there for Wordpress? There is no comparison. BizSpark is wonderful but it's preaching to the converted. It's not going to convince a teenager to learn .NET over PHP. New and young developers have little incentive to learn .NET and without fresh new programmers development is getting stale and expensive. Put yourself in the shoes of a new developer. You have PHP on one side and .NET on the other. PHP offers over .NET: Dirt cheap hosting. Easy setup/install (text editor and ftp). Major software like Wordpress - Free. Fully supported and working toolkits from Facebook and others. Thousands of free/cheap design templates for PHP based software. To me there's no question that .NET is a more powerful language than PHP. Reusable code, ability to debug with ease, fantastic FREE code editor (VS) and faster code execution are just some of the advantages .NET has. But .NET lacks the major prebuilt software to work with. Most code in .NET will cost a lot of money initially, be half built and half supported through open source, have little extended community support or just flat out not even have a competing version. My original point of Microsoft ignoring .NET developers was based on the abandonment of the facebook toolkit and a lack of software that competes directly with PHP based CMS. Your message shows me that maybe Microsoft isn't actually ignoring the programmers (building starter kits and such) but maybe they're just not understanding what we need. Why can't Microsoft just rip off Wordpress and other popular PHP software? Just copy it exactly, feature for feature. Don't try to make it better by creating thousands of extra features, just make an exact copy of Wordpress and other toolkits. Dan, thank you for replying both here and on the Facebook toolkit site (http://facebooktoolkit.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=52107 http://facebooktoolkit.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadI...). If I am truly preaching to the choir then help me by getting more Microsoft people involved in this discussion. Maybe we can make a difference here.