var is useful when used with factory functions. Makes changing the type returned by your factory function much easier if all the calls use "var x = MyFactory.GetConnection("foo");" Otherwise you may find yourself replacing 3000 SqlConnection declarations with DbConnection as we had to do.

Bitnami rocks. Lots of different stacks to pick from: plain LAMP, different CMSs, OSQA, all kinds of goodies

Agreed. If the site was developed in it/web I'll pass. It's easy to avoid browser problems by making everything look like is 1996

"It never comes true and it never is going to come true.". It apparently happened 12,000 years ago

"pinpoints the origin of weaker bones at the beginning of the Holocene epoch roughly 12,000 years ago, when humans began adopting agriculture". This doesn't have anything to do with tractor farming.

You can spin up Windows servers and sql server instances in AWS. And other commercial products, like HANA. So cloud providers certainly do track licenses. It's baked into the price you pay for those instances.

Why are you locked in? If you have web services calling web services it doesn't really matter what a web service is written in. There are some nice .net platforms that don't come from MS, like ServiceStack or Nancy. Even the MS Mvc.Net platform is mono compatible (and was already open source) so you can run Linux with docker running 6 instances of your service.

I didn't realize you didn't have to declare runtime errors, sorry.

Depends on what you mean. We don't use linq to sql because you're not sure of the sql you'll generate. Linq to objects is quite nice. Joining two lists of objects in memory automatically rather than writing your own low level code to copy things over is awesome.

Because you know ahead of time all the possible things that can go wrong in your method?

C# can compile to android apps and ios apps now too. It's not just a server world any more.

Visual studio, xamarin studio, and some of the java IDEs are in the latest jolt ide awards. They're all generally recognized as good.

This is why it bums me out that my company is spending so much developer time trying to move off of ms languages.

You don't actually. That's the point of open sourcing .net core, to really beef up mono. MS has a strong commitment to supporting mono, especially in vNext. You can write C# to target mono, ios, and android and ignore Windows deployment entirely

I turn 40 in eleven days. Definitely starting to feel crusty. I've been in tech long enough now to see ideas come, go, and chime back again.