Sorry that last part was a mis-stated. A lot of .NET is Windows desktop programming.
A lot of the "web" stuff is XBAP or whatever which is basically desktop packaged to go in IE.
Sure there is plenty of ASP.NET development going on, and that is over the web.
But come on, you can't say that most .NET software is not closed source. Sure, some of it is being 'opened up', but for the most part, ASP.NET and C# libraries and components are not open source. Especially when you compare the ratios to other platforms.
>But come on, you can't say that most .NET software is not closed source.
Which is probably why I said nothing even close to that.
I can only really talk about the web related tech. Huge parts of ASP.NET are open source.
Then you have projects like F# which are open source.
Nuget package manager is open source (formed out of two community open source projects).
The Dynamic Language Runtime is open source.
IronRuby and IronPython are both open source.
MEF is open source.
The Orchard CMS is open source and control has actually been given completely over to the community.
Silverlight controls was open source.
I could go on and on. Open source is bigger in microsoft than you give it credit for. When you imply that most .net software is closed source, it's true, but you can say that about any language. Most software written in ruby is closed source. The one exception might be javascript, because you can't really close the source to that.
However, you can take a look at the big .NET open source projects, or just the AltDotNet community for the counterpoint.
>Especially when you compare the ratios to other platforms.
That is a meaningless metric
>So, honestly one of the main reasons I got out of .NET was because it seemed like it wasn't as cool as I thought it was anymore.
How in the world can C# not be considered cool? It's statically typed and reflective. It's got generics (reified) and delegates. Those things led directly to anonymous types, anonymous functions (lambdas, if you wish), co & contra variance, and type inference. Those things led to expressions which enabled Linq. Then you throw in dynamics. The next version will have the compiler as a service and the 'await' keyword which vastly improves multi-core and event drive programming.
Yeah, there are other languages out there that are doing some cool things. I don't see how anyone could think C# isn't cool, though. BTW, while microsoft is still working on their C# 5 compiler, Mono (the open source .net implementation) has already completed theirs and it is available today. They had compiler as a service before microsoft even announced it.
A lot of the "web" stuff is XBAP or whatever which is basically desktop packaged to go in IE.
Sure there is plenty of ASP.NET development going on, and that is over the web.
But come on, you can't say that most .NET software is not closed source. Sure, some of it is being 'opened up', but for the most part, ASP.NET and C# libraries and components are not open source. Especially when you compare the ratios to other platforms.