You started a flame war over vendor lock in? What about language lock in? DBMS lock in? Or even the forbidden OS lock in?
I don't care what you use, it has lock in of some kind. Get over it. VS2008, C#/VB.NET, ASP,NET, MSSQL are great tools. That's all these things are: tools. The end product is always the same. If you build something with Ruby you can't go back and fix it with PHP. Lock in? Yep.
The point is you are locking yourself into a brand that has explicitly anti-competitive business practices, charges exorbitant rates for their licenses and not only shuns public standards but actively works to sabotage them! (ecmascript3 being the example I am thinking of the last) VS2008 is a tool, C# is a language. Locking yourself to C# (for all intents and purposes) locks you to development on a windows box using VS2008 and commits you to serious trouble deploying under linux or mac, most times. Is that the same as choosing Java or Ruby and vi vs emacs? No, no it is not.
To each their own. I just think that you should use the right tool for the job, not the most popular one. If your opinion comes into play when selecting a tool, you're doing it wrong.
Sure, there's lock in and perhaps Microsoft is engaged in anti-competitive practices. They are a business, after all. But what is wrong with the tools? Visual Studio, C#, VB.NET, IIS? Point out some real issues like the current state of ASP.NET's AJAX toolkit or linq2sql's inability to do perform joins efficiently without an associated view.
I might be playing devil's advocate here, so please don't take me the wrong way. I just want people to look at their tool box more closely and make decisions on real, measurable things.
Disclaimer: I work on everything from ColdFusion, PHP and ASP.NET to Perl, cmd and shell scripts. I have no zealotry in me except for an extreme love of Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, Macs and the opposite sex.
That IS a real issue, vs the (relatively) open nature of Java and the absolute openness of tomcat, apache? I personally think that open source tools are inherently superior because it of the additional eyes on the code reducing screwups and deliberately bad code. One very serious issue is that their anti-competitive acts make them opposed to standards (e.g. their work on the EcmaScript3 standard and what would have been a great harmonization of AS4 and JS2!) and it's better to work with standards for obvious reasons... Being involved with open source, standards compliant tools gives you an awful lot of advantages.
I don't care what you use, it has lock in of some kind. Get over it. VS2008, C#/VB.NET, ASP,NET, MSSQL are great tools. That's all these things are: tools. The end product is always the same. If you build something with Ruby you can't go back and fix it with PHP. Lock in? Yep.