My startup is based on Windows, the .NET Framework, ASP.NET for Web pages, and ADO.NET for interacting with SQL Server. For the programming language, I'm using Visual Basic .NET -- as Kernighan and Ritchie, IIRC, stated in their C, the lanugage has an idiosyncratic syntax, which it turns ou I don't like. Since C# borrows some of that syntax, I prefer the more traditional (like PL/I, Pascal, Fortran, Algol, etc.) syntax of Visual Basic .NET.

When I selected this collection of tools, I seemed to see that there were some big, famous, successful, busy Web sites using these tools.

So far, I'm pleased with these tools but would like much better technical writing in the documentation.

Some things about the tools are really nice. So far my code is about 100,000 lines of typing and about 25,000 programming language statements. I typed in all the code using my favorite text editor (KEdit) and have made no use of Visual Studio or any other integrated development environment. For me, KEdit and Rexx as a scripting language work fine. For a scripting language, I may convert over to Microsoft's Power Shell, but I see no big need to do that now.

For organizing my work, I make heavy use of the Windows NTFS hierarchical file system -- it looks terrific, like some of Microsoft's and/or the industry's best software.

For the CORE, I have no more than 15 seconds of understanding what the heck that is. AFAIK, I won't be using the CORE, whatever the heck it is.