> innovation in the C# language places it as the most advanced production level language on the market (IMHO).

On a scale of 1 to 10 of vagueness/subjectiveness, this would be a 30.

I like the new additions, like Linq or the properly done closures or generics.

But throwing words like "innovative" or "advanced" for techniques used from the late '70-ties brought together in a language with the same corporate-stinch of Java or Cobol?

Yeah, right.

> Form validation (client and server side with the same code) is still a killer feature.

Form validation is a hard feature to get right. I do not agree that the validation done in ASP.NET MVC is a "killer", especially since I've hit hard limitations in the first hours of me trying it.

In case you're wondering about what limitations I'm talking about ... try building a dynamic forms system that gets stored in the DB (fields, references to validation rules) allowing a user to build some forms and for another user to supply values for those forms.

The only validation system I've seen that's reasonably productive and that works in most cases is the one in Django, but even that is lacking considering you have to add your own code to have client-side validation and keep it DRY (although that happens due to Django's policies, not due to bad design, and really it's not that big of a deal to add something that works well in most cases ... bringing server-side validation to client-side is an easy to solve problem, unless your framework is fucked-up).

> Easy deployment as there is only IIS

You are probably kidding, although I'm happy they finally discovered the virtues of text configuration files.

> no decisions about fcgi, mogrel, keeping your processes running, etc

Not every platform is as fucked-up as Rails ... mod_wsgi for Django (or any wsgi compliant Python framework) just works with no headaches.

It takes me 20 minutes flat to manually get an EC2 instance up and running with everything needed. And I can quickly automate that in a way Windows devs cannot begin to dream of.

> You've got one of (if not THE ) best IDE's with easy debugging, intellisense

Sometimes I miss that, but not that much, mostly because I need the flexibility to use the best tool for a certain job, not to mention that sometimes I don't have a choice in the tools I use.

That's why I'm using Emacs ... the flexibility I gained made me several times more productive than a clicky-clicky IDE.

If you don't believe me, try working with Python from VS.NET, while using pychecker/pylint to automatically check your code (let's say it's a company policy) and to also use ReviewBoard in combination with a Git repository.

Or better yet, try debugging with VS a production environment.

> some of the best documented API's and code in existence

In comparison with Django it pales.

Not only does it have good documentation, but when it's lacking the clarity of the actual code is breathtaking ... yes, devs using Django are actually looking at its source-code and I have quite a few friends developing on top of ASP.NET ... none are doing that.

Maybe it's a cultural thing, maybe it's because ASP.NET is proprietary, the end-result is the same though ... the Django devs I know have intimate knowledge of Django's internal mechanisms, while ASP.NET devs do not.

> Is there some missing feature or just sad that he can't be one of the cool kids?

HN has degraded a lot recently. I see many comments containing ad hominems that are getting upvoted.

Pity.