Look at the success of Xamarin moreover their tools that can be used to create systems in Mono in F#, C# et al hosted on Linux with Nancy behind Nginx using Postgres.
The OSS ecosystem is growing too look at Edge.js for a good example of some innovation where C# and F# can strengths can be utilised in conjunction with other ecosystems with more focus on web.
It may not be perceived as trendy but there's plenty of developers familiar with that ecosystem. If you're in London for example finding decent C# devs is not a tall order.
People either not aware or pretend not to aware or have their biases set already when it comes to Mono.
I'm not sure if people aware that the commercial entity behind Mono is focusing on Mobile heavily than enterprise and I'm not sure if these people are aware of the repercussion of that.
My comments are to highlight comments made by others too; that language and platform familiarity weigh very heavily in the decision process and that discounting the entire Microsoft ecosystem based on licencing is not a cut-and-try process as it perhaps once was.
The ecosystem is diversifying and growing. It may not be as mature, advance, diverse as other platforms but for those already familiar with the technology it is a viable option.
2. Click on the Products menu
3. Click on Express 2012 products
4. There is no step 4
The Express products are completely functional although they lack certain non essential features. The main limitation of the Express editions is that you can't use third party plugins with them. Third party plugins are used to enhance Visual Studio itself and are not to be confused with third party libraries which you can download conventionally or with the built in package manager Nuget.
The Express editions are distributed by task so you only download what you need. If you don't want to create Windows Phone apps, for example, you don't have to download that functionality.
To develop web apps you have to download Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web.
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-st...
It allows you to develop ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET WebForms apps with C# or VB.NET right out of the box but you can also use it to develop web services with WebAPI, regular HTML5 websites, etc. And out of the box you can deploy by using FTP, WebDeploy and Azure but you can also use whatever external tool that you like.
The product includes a copy of MS SQL Express that runs as a process but you're not limited to using Microsoft databases.
Oh, no, you're definitely right about that. What I meant was weird was that nobody seemed to describe it in those terms, so I was looking for the wrong thing.
Thanks for the rundown! Now that I actually have some idea what I'm doing, I'll have to give it another go once I get a bit of free time.
To get the other software free, you need to sign up for BizSpark (which requires jumping through a few hoops). http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/
The express apps should be sufficient for building apps (I'm using them for a desktop app right now) and should allow you to learn the Microsoft stack with minimal effort.
Wait until your operation gets bigger and requires monitoring and all the goodies specifically for IIS/Windows Server.
I'm sure someone will just "lol, use your MSDN (or whatever it is now) subscription", and when you have that and it's being paid for that's fine, and the tools are nice. But it's way too much for small shops to bother with, IMO.