It was nice to hear Blaine Cook, Joe Stump and Tim Bray all telling us that platform and language agnosticism is the way forward and that we shouldn’t just be a developer of ‘X’, for any value of ‘X’, but I was appalled by the zealousy shown to me by a lot of the younger developers.

As soon as it was revealed, during the course of our conversations, that I developed predominantly on the .NET framework, I was met with varying reactions, some of them comical and humorous, some of them with valid points, but some of them just downright uninformed and, in some cases, rude.

Whilst – as you say – Microsoft can certainly help improve the image and help foster communities by sponsoring grassroots community conferences and local user groups, I’m not so sure the full responsibility falls at their doorstep.

My team strives to make sure our work is standards compliant, accessible and with solid design, and when I’ve showcased some of our work to people in the past, they’ve asked “Oh, what do you use for that? PHP? Rails? Django?” and are almost shocked when we tell them it’s .NET.

Perhaps, like you say, us friendly .NET developers just need to get our geek on and put the good work out there for all to see.