In my opinion though, MS should standardise their data access technologies instead of having so many to choose from, especially with the new ones they’ve brought out like LINQ and the entity framework.

Whilst older technologies may not be the thing, they’re much more robust and easier to debug in my opinion.

That reflected the user base well – there were lots of VB6 graduates, and developers in environments that were heavily desktop and small-server oriented, moving upwards to more complex things. People coming from the other end, from large enterprise & distributed systems, tended to go for Java not because of the language (which we can safely say C# has now surpassed), but because the architectural components were there, they were mature, and there were a number of options reflecting different kinds of systems. Open source added massively to this of course.

.Net will get there – MS have in the last couple of years woken up to the yawning gap in their offering, that so many developers didn’t seem to even recognise was there (“It’s all about how clever the language and IDE is!”. Er, no). But, they’re only one company, and these things take time to build and to mature. I still think the ‘ivory tower’ model they use delivers results too slowly and not necessarily the way their user base wants, but CodePlex is growing fast so with time, that will undoubtedly be a great source of components once the law of natural selection has had time to identify & polish the best ones.

The question is it will get there fast enough, before Google or someone else makes it irrelevant, or whether MS will continue to take the strategy of obseleting their own technology before it’s had chance to grow up (e.g. L2SQL), rather than building a steady, incremental platform.