> Microsoft is not your friend

Nor is google or Oracle. So who is? To put this in perspective you need to look at the alternatives. Getting a free (as in speech) source CLR/BCL/JIT/Compiler and a free (as in beer) IDE is pretty sweet.

Sure, you can do python or Node.js, but it's not covering all that you can do now with .NET. Only java/jvm really competes on "everything except high perf" (from enterprise to mobile to cloud etc.).

And in the java universe you may end up with Ask toolbar, Eclipse and tears on your keyboard.