Asp.net Vs. Php

Mike, I could name dozens of large sites that use MS Servers.
Have you EVER seen microsoft.com down?

Actually, yes, quite frequently.

Also, microsoft's website doesn't function correctly under the majority of browsers. I just spent 2 hours on the phone with MSN's tech support trying to download the MSN 8 software, and they couldn't tell me why their web page wouldn't show up in my browser.

Mike,

Most people have no idea what MS and .NET can do for them. It's much more than just a simple .php page can do.

The big advantage of PHP and UNIX that I see is the huge availability of resources and programmers. If you look on the job boards, there are hundreds of companies hiring ASP people, and only two or three hiring UNIX folks. The ASP postings stay up for weeks, whereas the UNIX postings are taken down within a few days. Do you know why? because nobody can find anyone who develops in ASP.

Microsoft Development environments hide too much from you, their debuging systems don't work, they crash constantly, slowing development cycles and frustrating developers.

In order to develop a simple page you first have to build yourself a class library, because the .NET library adresses a lot of very in-depth and interesting stuff, but fails to adress many of the basic, simple tasks that a web application developer needs. I spent 3 weeks trying to learn ASP.net at one point, and simply gave up in frustration. By comparison, it took me 3 weeks to go from barely knowing the PHP library to coding robust object oriented portal systems using XML-RPC and SOAP.