[stevecooperorg]

This story could be told of any developer who doesn't update his skills for seven years. You could tell this story for Java developers, Flash developers, PHP developers, etc. Anyone peddling skills from 2006 is going to be looking pretty dated, no matter what stack you're talking about.

I also don't see this: "I would fault them for building their entire ecosystem with total disregard for standards, their refusal to work with whatever community existed outside." My daily experience is very different. If I start a new project, it'll almost certainly be on the open-source (Apache 2.0) ASP.NET MVC platform. That gives me Twitter Bootstrap, Knockout.js, OAuth2.0, etc. It's a neatly integrated patchwork of commonly-used, standards-happy, open-source frameworks and libraries, and it'll work happily on safari and chrome and on my phone. So I don't feel particularly isolated away from the rest of the development world.

Summary is, I'm sure this vision was true years ago, but things seem to have moved on. I think that now, if I want to put together software using modern approach, there aren't approaches or technologies that the MS stack makes tricky. But I'm happy to be corrected; are there technologies or approaches I can't use fairly easily on the MS stack? Cloud computing? single page apps? continuous integration? BDD? etc. What am I missing?