If you start building your project on a particular stack and then need to move, there will always be a transition cost.

I'm not trying to start yet another OSS vs. MS war here, but all other things being equal, with one option you have to pay money for server/DB licenses (and then constantly worry about compliance), and with the other you don't.

I understand why companies use Windows - they need common desktop apps, they need Office. But the question was about web development. There is little advantage to using MS tools, in fact most of my web dev associates would say they are worse. Worse, and expensive, especially the databases.

Why sign up for that kind of trouble? Stick to OSS.

Easier access to support with OSS web platforms than .Net. I find OSS proponents much more open and willing to blog about difficult issues that they have solved and provide free code and workarounds. This is not as true in the .Net realm, but it is getting better.

Third-party libraries/plug-ins cost money in the .Net world. Its much easier to find free IDE plugins and libraries/apis for your platform in the OSS world. in .Net the alternatives cost money usually a small amount, but it does add up. (I'm guessing because it's cheaper for corporations to spend a small amount to solve a problem than hire a dev to custom build a solution, and .Net has a large corporate install base.)

However, I have to disagree with the statement about the tools and database. I gave them a try recently and actually found the experience much more pleasing than I thought... in fact going back to eclipse for work on the monday had me missing a few features in Visual Studio. I can't speak about SQL Server in a prod environment, but the db dev tools with the express version of visual studio are pretty cool. Rather than going by third person reviews, try it out yourself, you can get the web installer at http://www.microsoft.com/Web/downloads/platform.aspx and the MVC tutorial at (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-n...)

Personally I think the tutorial just proves my original point if you do work through it. Its a chapter from a book by the creators of .Net MVC and whilst free, the whole book is not, most other popular frameworks would release the full book as a free download.

And the reason you'd need to move is because Windows is costing you too much, at which point you realise you're locked in! So, yet another reason to avoid Windows like the plague.

I won't bother to respond to the rest of your laughable shilling.

Call me cheap, but I think choosing Visual Studio is like training yourself to spend money. I'd stick with Eclipse or Notepad++ or Gedit plus Apache and Django or Rails, or something in that direction. Especially for web development, money doesn't buy you much beyond bandwidth.

I should shut up now though.

Free software is chosen not because it's free, but because it's /good/ software. Hackers have helped develop their own tools and fixed bugs themselves, so most stuff is very stable. And when there's a need for a new feature, they make it, so it's very capable. It's like survival of the fittest for software.

I think a lot of people (and companies) have the idea that you can't get anything good for free. In the software world, that just isn't true.

Companies like Slicehost realize this, and give you full control over your slice. Before you deploy though, you could probably just do with a ubuntu box shoved under your bed.

Might not be a show stopper for some people but it's not ideal.

I think you're onto something there, although we could expand it into an even more general rule: "Anyone who has ever done any standards-compliant web development at all, ever, hates Microsoft".

Fair?

If, by "fair," you mean, "Is what I just said true?" Then no.

Ubuntu + Eclipse IDE = develop pretty much any language, for free.