This is bad advice. In this day in age it is a serious mistake to start learning back-end development on the Microsoft stack. Microsoft technologies are non-existent in every aspect of cloud computing... which is the future of back-end development, and the basis of the future of mobile/web computing. I know a few Windows die hards that are practically unemployable these days because they were either afraid, or technically incapable, of using Linux and command line tools, and now their MCSE point-and-click skills are useless in the new mobile/cloud computing age.

Python on Linux would be a much better option.