.NET is slowly beeing weeded out of the enterprise though and that's a trend I don't want to see diminished by devs picking up .NET because it's now "open source". It's OK to hate .NET, open source or not.
Lol, are you serious about that? That's not true at all! I work at a fortune 500 company and it's the exact opposite: it's Java that everyone is trying to weed out. There are several reasons for this, but they include these three things: Java's performance is slower than .Net, Java's IDEs are not as good as .Net's (Visual Studio is probably the best IDE ever built), and most importantly, the constant daily updates of Java to fix security flaws are driving everyone crazy and causing support nightmares. When haven't you recently turned on your computer only to have Java say an update is ready to install, and then pop up it's really slow installer to do it (that tries to install Ask.com as your homepage to boot)?
And one other thing about Java and another reason enterprises are trying to weed it out... the various Java application servers sprawling all over the place are seriously annoying and make supporting Java well a massive undertaking of training and manpower. In my organization, we have purchased Java applications from vendors that are based on all of these: Oracle Weblogic, IBM Websphere, Apache Tomcat, Redhat JBoss, and Apache Geronimo, and we have to figure out how to admin and support them all. And worse, none of these are as good as .Net/IIS, which is what we've chosen for all custom development that we do in house.
Plus, there are other things about .Net that make it better than many alternatives. For one thing, it's not a language, it's a runtime. There are all variety of languages you can use, which means you can use .Net whether your programmers come from a C syntax background or a Visual Basic type of background. And when it comes to web technologies, MVC and other .Net contributions are excellent: much better than the Java equivalents. And IIS is a fantastic web servers these days. True, it got off to a rocky, buggy start and trailed Apache for years, up through the IIS 6 days, but with IIS 7 and above it's actually much better than Apache, both in ease of administration and more importantly, in performance (why is Apache still spawning processes for every request that comes in... don't they realize the overhead of that??). A lot of the performance reasons that are behind people switching from Apache to Nginx are also capabilities that IIS has.
So I really don't understand where this bashing of .Net comes from, but I'm guessing a lot of it is from open source fanboys that love to hate Microsoft and have never taken time to use the recent (last 3-5 years) iterations of it's products. I totally get that a lot of people up to now have certainly preferred open source because it is free, but with .Net going that way a lot of you should try it. Having used Java and .Net both, I'd never in a million years pick Java over .Net. And I'd never pick PHP over .Net either, because that technology is pretty much the equivalent of what Microsoft's classic ASP was a decade ago, and .Net is far ahead of it now.