That's a nice story Harr but none of us are MS salesmen. You want to know how MS salesmen handle thing I suggest you call their marketing department. We're just guys doing our job that work at varying degree of closeness with/ for MS. When you go running around saying MS has duped the consumer you're saying we're dumb, because we ARE the consumer you say is duped. So we react defensively. On the other side of that you react defensively to any assault on your entrenched position (just look at you conspiratorial excuse writing off that HUGE list of places deploying .Net as nothing more than "MS partners") which really does make reasonable discussion with you kind of pointless. On the one had you insult us (I don't think you mean to, but you do) and on the other you refuse to listen to anything we say (again I'm not sure you mean to, I think you have strongly held beliefs and your bar of proof against them is just too high for anyone not named God to achieve... and I'm not convinced you'd believe God if He came down and told you MS made good stuff).
If you want these to be reasonable discussions you've got to tone down the rhetoric and tune up the ears.
That's a nice story Harr but none of us are MS salesmen. I believe at least 2 folks here, and likely 3, are indeed MS salesmen. As with any salesman, I am critical of 'hard sell', 'our product can do no wrong' sales tactics. If you can't see those in this thread, I can't imagine we could have much of a worth-while discussion on the product.
MS Salesmen *do* dupe their customers. So do Oracle salesmen. Oracle isn't half as good as the Oracle salesmen claim. But then again, the Oracle salesmen don't get mad at me when I mention I like MySQL.
And how did I insult anyone? I still don't see it, looking back. It's very clear how I was insulted -- called names, etc. Which has become a badge of honor on these threads.
I was saying nice things about .NET, and was asking for anyone's experiences with .NET so I could hear how far along it's development is, and I got flamed for even mentioning java.
If ya'll are so locked into one company that you can't even allow the mention of another tech in a thread, I think you might wonder about a few things.