It will be interesting to see how many startups succeed using this program. Since startups often employ tools for competitive advantage, this will be a good test between the microsoft and open source tool chains.
Also, as pg's essay points out, great hackers like to work with great tools / languages, so it will be interesting to see if they can recruit the right talent.
I'm using BizSpark to get access to tools so I can develop some Office plugins and related msi installers. In such a situation, the greatest competitive advantage is found using their tools. And, in general, you should be able to use any language that targets the CLR.
"Competitive advantage" means roughly "doing things your competitors can't". You can't do that with off-the-shelf tools unless your competitors are in Nigeria and can't afford them.
you can do it with off-the-shelf tools if your competitors decide to use really "hackerish" languages and tools and end up taking longer to produce the same or lesser product.
What I meant was, Microsoft is always changing and renaming things. I would not be surprised if "Azure" will have a new name, new group, new PUM, new logo, and a new API next month. If its still here at all. That's one reason learning Microsoft tools gives me a headache. By comparison, the *NIX toolset is relatively stable.
Their constantly shifting brands etc. matches how they are constantly reorganizing their groups internally. Its an endless shuffle game and a lot is lost in the churn.
Visual Studio cannot be beaten, especially when free. C# is evolving towards better support for concurrency and functional style programming. F# is getting much acclaim even from die hard critics of .NET. You can use one framework for your entire application--be it frontend (ASP.NET MVC), backend, enterprise, even distributed computing on Amazon (MPI.NET). An added bonus is that the majority of professional programmers out there are familiar with .NET in case you ever need to hire (this is slightly more true outside the realm of web development and silicon valley).
Regarding support online, I've never had a problem self learning .NET, especially with MSDN, the ASP.NET community at large, and now stackoverflow.com.
Visual Studio is a provincial piece of work that can't even get its imitations right - viz. the need for plugins (Resharper) to bring it up to minimal acceptability. The only people I know who praise Visual Studio are the ones who believe that Microsoft is responsible for all computing innovation.
(Though I seem to recall that as a C++ environment 10 years ago it was pretty good.)
I want to add to the chorus of "What experience are you comparing Visual Studio to?" You're sort of damning it with faint praise by touting things like "evolving towards concurrency" and Microsoft's alpha-quality OCaml clone, F#, as a selling point. Obviously .NET wouldn't have a future if it wasn't doing cloud, functional, concurrent, and support online, but it's sort of chasing the taillights of the open-source community there.
Scheme, Ruby and C mainly. Starting to explore Python and Objective C for various reasons. My comment wasn't intended to tout .NET as the best technology for every purpose as I realize the advantages of higher level languages for everyday development. He asked for a few advantages of .NET and I sincerely believe that with this new program, a lot of the barriers to using MSFT technologies have been removed. My current start up deals more with numerical problems that IMO are best tackled by C# and C++/CLI (or Python with C extensions). Similarly, if I was looking to write a simple web app, I'd go with ruby.
The best place for ASP.NET support right now is stackoverflow.com. Outside of that, you'll find ASP.NET to be much more valuable and productive once you get away from doing it the Microsoft way. Close the designer, learn the page lifecycle if you must use Webforms, try ASP.NET MVC, don't use ASP.NET AJAX, turn off ViewState and avoid any of the *View controls. The built-in controls were designed Winforms developers so they could easily get started developing with Webforms. Once you get over that (it took me a long time), the framework becomes really enjoyable and powerful to work with.
Here is the profit(not revenue) filed under their latest annual report for their server and tools division, the exact software you are claiming they can't "give away"
Server and Tools: 4,261(2008) 3,593(2007) 2,980(2006)
Shhh.. if there's one thing that I realized about this kind of MS criticism is that they will usually answer with something like "yeah, but in ZXY years, the business is doomed!", or "when Google releases its Office suit"...
And you know, for more than a decade I've been reading stuff like this. Now, I prefer Linux development over Windows, but MS is the most sucessfull tech company. Ever. And year after year it has managed to improve its profits. (cue monopoly comments in 1, 2..)
