Its weird that the HN crowd just seems to assume that the advice to use linux and mono just has to be a better idea than using windows.

If you haven't looked at windows since 2003 you really need to take a look at server 2012 R2. The default installation mode is server core. It requires dramatically fewer patches. Management with PowerShell is incredibly powerful. IIS has seen many, many improvements.

Also, "developing your app for azure" is a weird statement. If you develop for Azure Websites you are literally just writing an asp.net web app or api. it runs in IIS in a VM. It just has some management wrapped around it so that you don't have to take care of the VM(s). It has autscale, monitoring, and all the stuff you would expect from a cloud provider. Writing your app to use SQL Azure, or Azure storage, or something like that is just like using the comparable services from Amazon. It's like anything else...you should implement its usage as an interface so you can swap it out if need be.

Some people on HN have accused me of working for MS just because I use their stuff. I'm not, nor have I ever been, a MS employee. I'll admit that I started looking into windows a couple of years ago because I was bored with Linux and Unix. I've found that if you put the time in to understand how it works its incredibly productive and thorough. If you try to make it work like unix it will suck. If you learn PowerShell and stay away from the "clickety-clickety" thing it's awesome.

From a development standpoint I actually like the total stack approach...but that's me. If you need to use best of breed components you can still do that with .Net. For me though, my interests shifted to C++ a while ago, so .Net stuff for web api's get's the work done when I have to do it. I would like to see more stuff like openstack in the .net world, but system center is fine. The stuff that I do ends up being important enough for enterprises that getting funds for that kind of thing is just part of the package.

That's another thing. I'm completely uninterested in startups. I've worked at startups in various roles in the past and I'm just over it. Any startup that I built would have to be something that I could run by myself that immediately made money that I would keep. Investment funding is shit. It's a hassle that is super crazy. Dealing with "business" types that aren't technical enough to understand the challenges is also completely off the table. If you did choose to work with a VC then it's much better to be making money and talking about selling out totally instead of implanting them in your life. Shudder.

The one thing that I think Windows needs is a container style app deployment model. The coolest thing going in large scale app building is CoreOS. Its the future of how a large scale app will be built and deployed.

The new, and much loathed, metro applications are actually a good starting place for building a container system. They use feature called "app containers" that was first introduced in Vista. Add to that an app package that installs and uninstalls as a unit, called APPX. They haven't made any noise about using the new app model for servers, but it would be a great idea. It uses an API monitor that stops calls to things like LoadLibrary or GetProcAddress and all the other API's that let you bootstrap malware. Anyway, like I said, they haven't made any noise about it...it would be cool though.