In my humble opinion, the biggest advantage of .net, is visual studio.
For the on boarding experience, i think it's really worth putting emphasis on the fact that the free Express versions are really fully functional products for daily use.
For the on boarding experience, i think it's really worth putting emphasis on the fact that the free Express versions are really fully functional products for daily use.
When you start from VIM, Emacs or even TextMate, XCode is going to look good. Starting from the Visual Studio experience makes XCode look less stellar.
I think it's a bit of Apples to Oranges, especially since (a) they view the GUI and code interaction quite differently and (b) .NET is managed whereas XCode's languages usually aren't, making the toolset behave differently (for example, the .NET debugger can do a lot more introspection than the XCode debugger can in some situations).
In any event, I dig VS.NET and use it for any Windows development I do. But I think your perspective is skewed a bit. I came from VS to these other tools and love them, but I'm a bit of a simplicity nut so it might just be my preferred workflow. :)