[avenger123]

You know, to some extent, this is a direct result of working with Microsoft tools. I am generalizing but Microsoft developers get to used to getting mostly nice and tidy answers to everything (regardless if its good).

With open-source, my gosh, you actually have to do some analysis and make a sound judgement without having the Microsoft mothership tell you whether its good or bad.

I don't dispute that the choices can be seen as overwhelming but this is where experience and your own curiosity work best. You don't have the experience, well there is many many people that do and are willing to share their knowledge. It does require a desire to learn. The more you investigate, the better your filter on what is good or what is bull improves.

I use Microsoft tools, they have their place. It's not a question off giving up control and power, its a question of, what makes you better? Understanding the dirty work that it takes to make software, OS, web frameworks, etc. work, or having a nice little button that does this for you (I know this is a gross exaggeration).

If you have that curiosity to understand the details even behind Microsoft tech, using Microsoft is just another tool.

[MichaelGG]

There's a lot of development and apps that simply are not going to have any real difference based on their choice of ORM or even DB. Having it all-in-one has a lot of benefits.

Also, it's unfair to say open source isn't the same. How many PHP projects fairly evaluated anything but MySQL or PHP's built-in MySQL data access libs? And why would you? If you aren't at the point where you need to evaluate, your app will probably work fine on MySQL anyways. Also, Ruby-on-Rails provides quite a bit of defaults...

Microsoft might provide more kinds of libraries, but that's only because of their size. If Zend created an MVC system and built it into PHP, what kind of uptake would that see?

[jf22]

"With open-source, my gosh, you actually have to do some analysis and make a sound judgement without having the Microsoft mothership tell you whether its good or bad."

I think you're comment is fair but a little condescending.

Speaking for myself, I play and experiment with tons of non-ms libraries for asp.net work, ran Ubuntu as a desktop for several years, have an trivial app on heroku.

Just because somebody appreciates the simple things does not mean they don't have curiosity and don't appreciate knowing technology on a lower level.

The big divide between the ms and non-ms communities is because of this sort of comment.

[avenger123]

Not meant to come across that way (especially towards your comments).

I definitely agree that there is value with a full life-cycle integrated approach that Microsoft offers with their stack. I really like what Microsoft is doing with ASP.NET MVC. I also like their move towards embracing the best of open source such as their recent full support of git within their stack. I setup a gitlab virtual machine and using the Visual Studio git extension with it has its quirks but works really well. I find this a really good compromise of mixing the best of both worlds.

I guess my main angst is with Microsoft stack developers who I've worked with that really don't want to step outside their comfort zone. It's definitely obvious you are not within this group.