[eckyptang]

Examples: Windows Workflow (rewrites, drop of state machine model), AppFabric, Entity Framework (this is entirely volatile and unreliable), bugginess of MVC3 (attribute lifetimes, DI provider problems), Razor tooling (bugs, changes), IDE schizophrenia and unreliability, the mess that is MS11-100 (breaks every file download for us resulting in hours of work), Silverlight as a whole, ClickOnce being broken in IE9 (6 months for MS support to get us a fix).

I could go on. The whole thing is a dirty great minefield of crap. It's also entirely closed source which means you have to rely on the vendor to fix any problems, which we can't from experience, even though we pay them a fortune every year.

A robust framework is one that you can rely on to act consistently and reliably. It doesn't fulfill that requirement.

For the amount we're paying, we can afford to hire 5 new very senior guys in to fix any problems we have with open source software. That we can't do whilst we're paying for Microsoft.

Also, we feel screwed by the recent policy changes by Microsoft and do not want to end up in a walled garden or cloud service provider model which piggy backs of everyone else's work. Neither are a viable (or legal!) solution for what we do (high finance).

We're trialling various technologies at the moment. Python + Pylons/Pyramid + SQLAlchemy + RabbitMQ + PostgreSQL + ReportLab all on top of OpenStack is looking like the platform choice.

Azure doesn't have a SQL Azure instance that will fit 1/10th of our dataset.