Part of the problem was that until recent years, you couldn't get free dev tools for the MS platform, pretty much stifling the hobbyist developer from using .NE

Part of the problem was that until recent years, you couldn't get free dev tools for the MS platform, pretty much stifling the hobbyist developer from using .NET. Those are the people that tend to start and contribute to open source projects like the Facebook library. Now that there are free tools there's been an up swell in open source activity on projects like those and I think it will continue to get better.