[StrawberryFrog]

not just Microsoft stack

The Microsoft stack is not always just a Microsoft stack any more. e.g. it has jQuery out of the box. Of course you mix and match when you get to the high end. The idea of the MS-only shop is not as true as it used to be, many people are more pragmatic.

I find it sad that these days MS is laggin behind

Why, because MS didn't supply every single piece of server infrastructure software that So use, just the main ones? That's an odd definition of "lagging".

MS have a distributed cache called "Windows Server AppFabric" (formerly "velocity"). I don't know that much about it.

[sajidnizami]

I remember Velocity and articles on it initially. Thanks for the help. I am looking up AppFabric now.

See I prefer sticking with one flavor of tools because its easier for developers to adjust. TBH MS does supply almost everything from grounds up. I only had to look elsewhere for advanced distributed caching frameworks. In fact before switching to Amazon EC2 our old datacenter was running MS VMM and our stack still didn't have anything other than MS software.

[StrawberryFrog]

MS does supply a product in each category, but most MS dev shops that I have seen will more often than not be using some of: svn instead of Tfs, nUnit instead of MStest, castle or ninject instead of unity, nHibernate instead of EF, etc. And targeting firefox/chrome with jQuery. As far as I know there's no clear leaders in the distributed cache niche, and there is a fair amount of interest in noSQL stores like mongo, couch and ravenDb.

Where the open source choice is more functional, cheaper or just more familiar, it often gets used instead. This is good.