.NET actually isn't that bad as far as performance and stability go. It's about on par with Java. It's much faster than scripting languages, and significantly more stable than Ruby.

Administering a Windows stack can sometimes blow, but the languages and virtual machines themselves are relatively solid.

More stable than Ruby? Rails may have started off quite leaky, but to call anything that's been put into production in the past 2 years unstable is just plain FUD.

Yeah, so this was my point. There's quite a stretch from ".NET isn't that bad" to choosing MSFT because it performs well. And nobody has any numbers or benchmarks or anything that back this up other than anecdotal evidence.

Downvote away, but it's silly to be listing performance and stability as an advantage to choosing MSFT, when at best it seems to be on par with its competitors.

Do you have any proof otherwise? I've developed software on numerous platforms, and the Microsoft stack was incredibly stable, and performed better than any Ruby/PHP/Python stack I've worked with.

I prefer to do most things in Rails these days, but I'm not kidding myself that for raw performance, .NET is great.

Why is the burden of proof on me? I'm not the one claiming that the MSFT stack is incredibly stable.

.NET languages are compiled. The compilers build an intermediate representation (IL, similar to bytecode in languages that use a VM) and they're just-in-time compiled when they're first loaded, so they run as native code. As an aside, one advantage is your assemblies automatically compile to 32- or 64-bit based on your platform, so you get "free" access to +4GB of memory if you're deployed to a 64-bit machine.

Java (for example) and C# benchmarks tend to be close because Java is very mature and, even though it runs on a VM, is highly optimized. It compares favorably with C for this reason.

The MS compilers are very good and Mono is catching up. If you run on Linux, you'll probably be slower than Java in many cases. That will change over time.

Stability is a different question. The stability of C#, F#, etc. is not related to Windows and IIS as platforms. You can run C# based web stacks on Linux.

Since Windows 7, I'm not surprised to see someone connecting Microsoft with performance and stability.

(I'm pointing out MS had worse days, and is catching up seriously. I also realize an OS for home users might not be the best evidence in the world.)

Seems to work well enough for stackoverflow.