Unconventional

Probably the first thing to be remarked when coming from any environment to .net is going to be the tightly integrated tooling. When I used to do PHP in the late 90s early 00s, it was pretty much whatever text editor I could get my hands on.  There were some non-free IDEs, but none that were easily obtained or as impressive as Visual Studio, which also wasn't free until around 2006. Despite the differences though, Visual Studio has always been first class.  When the same people making the languages are also making the tools, you can expect a lot of extra convenience.  One thing that's kept my interest is that despite the tight coupling, most everything is still quite generalized, unlike 4GL environments like Delphi. Contrast .net with PHP where all you get the language and are responsible for building your stack upwards from there.  Not that our favourite friends LAMP and LEPP aren't just as mature.  Things like PHPstorm have come along to give that first c...

My first real successes with server programming were back in 1998 when I started tinkering with PHP.  Back then, ASP was at version 2.0 and was - similar to PHP - a way to mix markup and scripting.  Both tended to yield some fairly interesting results and I'd say for the most part, both were quite comparable. As such, even back then I had a choice.  I could focus my tinkering on the Microsoft based tools, or I could try my hand at this thing called open source I'd been hearing about. I had everything I needed to succeed in both spaces. I could either download everything for free or I had complete access to a set of MSDN discs in a binder with a cover like this: If I wanted to build ASP scripts that spoke to Access or SQL databases, it wouldn't have been a problem.  In some ways, I even tried, installing all the tools and trying out the environments. Each time however, I abandoned the effort because I felt like I couldn't tinker my way into it. So, Instead I...