[mola]

I find c# a great language, much better (more argonomic, less verbose, less 'patchy') than Java. I do believe that historically developing on .net didn't make sense for startups because of the huge licensing tax for the OS (servers and Dev stations) and developer tools. Moreover the usual bodies that preferred paying licenses for stable vendor were large, slow enterprises. This made .net appear less sexy and fashionable. We might see this turning around with the recent push for open source from Microsoft.

[cm2187]

Free, community editions of visual studio have been around for a long time now and are nearly as good as the more expensive pro version. I don't think the dev station side is still true. But on the server side, Windows Server and SQL Server still cost a fortune and I believe they raised their prices recently.

[fj39dkf]

For students and researchers. If you're operating a business you still have to pay for VS licenses, or violate the free license and hope you get big enough fast enough that it's not a problem.

[cm2187]

No I believe a company can use it up to 5 developpers. Which should cover the vast majority of start ups. Then you can buy a pro license for $500 which isn't that expensive if you have the financing for more than 5 devs.