[Ruudjah]

-Not OSS (note I didn't include the F)

-Cross-browser pains

-Vendor lockin (getting better with mono, but not officially supported by MS)

-Non-(f)OSS tools or less (F)OSS tools

-Non-OSS risk (can't patch if needed)

-No support for WebGL/other html5 tech

-Useless pushing of Silverlight while industry shifts to HTML5

[elbelcho]

I think your opinions are based on out of date info.

There are no real "cross-browser pains" when developing ASP.NET. I think you'd really have to go out of your way today to develop something that "works better" in IE than other browsers.

MS contributes to and supports Jquery and includes it by default in new projects.

Silverlight isn't really being pushed at all except on WP7. It was more of a flash competitor anyway and never was meant to compete with HTML5.

There are quite a number of FOSS tools for .NET development, and incredible amount of 3rd party support that's not FOSS.

Granted, most of their stuff isn't being released as OSS. I believe some of their newer tech is releasing source through codeplex.

Overall, most of the complaints I've seen in this thread about Microsoft are better directed at the Microsoft of the 90's and early 2000's than the Microsoft of today.

[jules]

Point 1, 3, 4 and 5 boil down to "not OSS".

Point 2 is not true, what does the back-end stack have to do with cross browser compatibility?

Point 6 isn't true either, for the same reason. You can perfectly well use WebGL and other HTML5 tech in a .NET web app.

Point 7 doesn't really matter. Microsoft themselves has said they are going for HTML5 not Silverlight.