I'll be honest, this post has been real hard to write. I have been working on it all week on the train and it still feels really awkward no matter how I phrase it. It's hard to express because some of it is feelings and hard to put into a logical post especially one needing reason.

So, based on my Microsoft at the Crossroads post, some may assume that I am ready to leave and fed up with everything Microsoft. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's like a relationship with your wife. I have had this relationship with Microsoft for nearly 25 years and it goes up and down, but the key is that Microsoft has enabled me to make a very good living and it's technologies have been pretty effective at solving business problems that I have encountered. Many times that has been at a price/performance point that has beaten competitors. I

 used to defend Microsoft from, well everyone on Ward's Wiki during my 1996-2000 stint there. I defended them because people were saying things I didn't find to be true. They were saying, without evidence, that the things I was doing with Microsoft technologies were just impossible, that Microsoft doesn't scale, that SQL Server is junk, and so forth. Meanwhile, my daily existence was MTS/COM+, SiteServer, VB and ATL/C++ and I was building and deploying large E-Commerce portals, some of which were scaling into the millions of transactions. They said no way. The reality was different. The technologies I was choosing were much less expensive then the corresponding EJB technologist and I was getting done faster. That equals customers happy and that equals great paychecks.

This may feel like a rip-off of Jeremy's post and I can assure you that well, it is :)

• Microsoft has created a vast ecosystem such that I and many thousands have earned a great pay check for 25 years - Others feel differently but I have always found ample opportunities in the ecosystem
• Windows has 91-96% of the market. You have to be crazy to deploy anywhere else
• There is a large community
• Windows Server 2003, 2003 R2 and especially Windows Server 2008 rock and provide a great application server platform
• Sharepoint Server rocks
• BizTalk Server, is a kick-ass product that pretty much glues anything to anything else, and at a low price relative to competitors
• Although Oracle is a fine product, and in use a lot of places, SQL Server continues to offer an unbeatable price/performance ratio
• The power of the CLR and .NET is so much better than the JVM.
• The CLR + .NET Framework has made me immensely productive. I can really deliver business value rapidly
• As Jeremy said, the ALT.NET community is starting to come together, the community is getting very dynamic and good things are starting to happen there
• For much of my career, I have been going to Building 20, included in numerous alphas and betas, and have really enjoyed a lot of direct access to individual employees and groups who have been super responsive!
• WCF rocks! With a minimal code I can have a service that runs pretty much anywhere and change it with a config file
• C# 3/Lamda Expressions/DLR/IronRuby/Silverlight/WF Silver/Orcas and more are worth looking forward to
• I want to take the beauty of Ruby and use it on the CLR!!