I get a kind of jQuery feel from .NET, but I haven't been following along for 9 years. By jQuery feel, I mean a fairly uneducated developer base that is happy to be well served by rote practice and already-engineered tooling. It's not an engaging or creative work environment, it's a get things done world where you kind of wade through "solutions" until you cross paths with some existing code that does whats needed, and use that. There's a bazillion people around all kind of muddling through with various backgrounds who pop up to regurgitate whatever tidbits they themselves have picked up. Both jQuery and .NET do a decent job of providing some componentizing, so you can pull stuff in without having to understand it. You certainly don't have to understand the target platform either: the web. RoR has a lot of similarities too in being a culture that remixes the available, and in hiding the real workings, within and of the target.
Before losing my sense of place in .NET, I was heavily enjoying alt.net stuff, largely owing to Boo (Python-alike .NET language with fantastic metaprogramming, AST, macros). Rather than take the normal webstack with Boo, I was using CastleProject's MonoRail (Ruby Sinatra alike) + Jayrock (old+excellent JSON omnibus lib) and Spring.NET to build json rest web-services. For me, it was easier investing in my client side and web application skills than it was learning how to dive into the engineered WebForms and ASP.NET and prototype-era ASP.NET MVC work to make them exhibit the behaviors I wanted. It was a great environment to code in, I liked the toolchain I'd come to use, but it was far afield the large .NET world and I had only scattered groups of practitioners (in these various techs I'd elected in) to work with & no overarching place to for myself as a developer of this Boo+MonoRail+Jayrock+Spring.NET thing I liked doing and thought fine.
I tend to believe ASP.NET MVC is probably in great shape by now and serves getting shit up very quickly. At the same time, I think culturally MS- alike jQuery, RoR, and let's throw in Apple- remains monocultural, with people invested heavily in fixed technologies that already define a huge amount of the experience and whose use won't port "out," (monoglot) and there's not a creative community base that celebrates those striving & seeking less beaten paths, the polymaths. The intellectual level of engagement is, in short, pretty shit, and the community is at end to help the far-ranging. Too many end-developers (end-users of dev kind), not enough well-motivated, working-for-it journeymen, and mastercraftsmen far removed and few between, with too few to sound out the practice with broadly and not situated for helping the weirder polymaths below experimenting with weird shit. Tall organization, huge fat base with low minimum bars to entry, and monocultural to boot: death.
Or rather, undeath: sustained, undying yet no longer alive quite either.