C#, .Net ASP, Visual Studio, and Azure are all very good development products. I know, because I tried them myself. Or ask the Stack Overflow guys. It's called thinking for yourself. As for your appeal to the recieved wisdom that everything MS does must suck because Graham said so, let me point out that their monopoly gives them very little advantage when it comes to catering to developers. No one has to use their servers, languages, DBs, etc. So they have to do a good job.