We are using Windows, the .NET Framework, IIS, ASP.NET, and Visual Basic .NET. We're on the .NET Framework 4.0 and see no reason to move to 4.5. For C#, not

We are using Windows, the .NET Framework, IIS, ASP.NET, and Visual Basic .NET. We're on the .NET Framework 4.0 and see no reason to move to 4.5. For C#, not interested: The syntax borrows from the deliberately idiosyncratic syntax of C, and the Visual Basic syntax is more verbose, easier to learn, teach, and read, and, thus, less error prone, is as a programming language in its semantics, features, and functionality essentially equivalent to C#, that is, the difference is mostly just syntactic sugar, and apparently is about as good as C# or anything else at getting at the CLR and the .NET Framework. For F#, people back to Backus have been working on functional programming, and, for more than just curiosity, and certainly for the work of our start-up, we're not impressed or interested, in that or logic programming, rule-based programming, or standing on our heads in the corner programming, etc. -- sorry 'bout that; we can agree to disagree, and YMMV. We're quite pleased with Visual Basic .NET. A hat tip to the Microsoft Visual Basic group. Main gripe: For the documentation, actually for all the documentation on MSDN, especially for SQL Server, please, please, please, get a least a C in technical writing 101. Our biggest problem in our start-up, far and away, much, much, much more difficult than everything else combined, literally, is the low quality of the technical writing at MSDN. For JavaScript, Microsoft's ASP.NET writes some for us, but so far we have yet to write a single line of it and will delay doing so as long as we can, hopefully forever. For ASP.NET, we are using just the basics, that is, with Sub Page_Init Sub Page_Load Sub Page_PreRender Sub Page_Unload etc. We have heard of MVC, looked at it a little, can see no reason for it or advantage in it, and intend to have nothing to do with it. Maybe better technical writing at MSDN would let us take MVC more seriously. We type into our favorite text editor and make no use of an IDE nor do we want to. For developing code for Web pages, ASP.NET and Visual Basic work nicely together -- it works fine. Actually, it's nice. For a session state store, we wrote our own using just instances of one class, de/serialization, TCP/IP raw sockets, and two collection classes. On an 8 core processor at 4.0 GHz, our session state store should be good for 11,000+ transactions a second; transactions is appropriate because the code is single threaded. Yes, on an 8 core processor we would run several instances with sharding. As we go live, our server will be just a single full tower case with an 8 core processor, 32 GB of main memory, some SSDs for a special purpose particular to our start-up, and some disks, with Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS, ASP.NET, our Web pages, our session state store, and some specialized back-end servers. The software and architecture are scalable via just simple sharding. We have little or no intention of using the cloud soon or ever. As we go live and grow, after the issue of the MSDN documentation, no doubt, and closely related to the documentation issue, our biggest concern will be Windows Server, SQL Server, and IIS installation, configuration, updates, security, monitoring, management, performance, administration, reliability, backup, and recovery -- little things like those. But from some of the just astounding successes Microsoft has running server farms with their software, clearly terrific results are possible; maybe we will be calling for some high end technical support. That's what we are doing!