[babul]

The basic tools are free but why get locked into MS with all it all its licensing, proprietary software/platform/toolset, upgrade, and cost issues.

MS does make some very good products (I use and like VS2008) but the core reason most hackers don’t use them is because they don’t want these aforementioned issues. This becomes more evident the more you scale.

It is no coincidence the top performing web-apps produced so far have not been based on MS software.