Exactly. The .NET "community" is home to mostly enterprise devs who only ever code to pay the bills. Any developer that is hip to Herkou, and loves Git and automated testing and deployment, is not going to be starting a new .NET app. They'll start an app in Ruby, Python, Clojure, Haskell or Smalltalk (or something).
I'm only speaking from experience here. It's just not a community of tinkerers that's on the cutting edge. I can't think of a single exciting .NET open source project. All of the good stuff that I know of in .NET is commercial: Stack Overflow, Unity, umm... anything else? It's a community that waits for the next thing to be handed down from Microsoft.
Show me Heroku for Seaside... now we're talking!
P.S. If anybody wants to show me some vibrant cutting-edge open source projects built on .NET instead of just downvoting, I'd love to know. Thanks!
The .Net community has a weird shade to it, absolutely.
That said, you're clearly speaking to your perception of what you see on tech-help boards -- and confusing that with the whole of the .Net ecosystem. .Net has vastly larger segment of 9-5/offshore/crap/whatever programmers than most other programming communities (aside from Java, being a similarly targeted platform). That doesn't mean that there aren't a bunch of DVCS-using, TDDing, PairProgramming, SE hipsters out there (or whatever you think is so awesome).
There's Mono (which kicks ass), NHibernate (which kicks ass), a plethora of cool projects on Github, C# is a killer language (compared to similarly rooted, C-like, imperative languages at least), F# has recently been promoted to a first class language on the platform, LINQ is unmatched in similar languages/platforms, .Net is pretty rock solid, and high performing. (edit: Oh, also, MVC, F# + MVC, Lightweight HTTP servers ala Sinatra)
Plus, the right tool for the right job. Let's not get all 'anyone who knows what's up would be using Ruby', etc.
The only really interesting part of .net to me is the F# language, which is ocaml for .net with sugary monad support. The language itself was recently open sourced, there's a VS vim plugin written in the language, and there's at least some game development going on in the language. F# is my language this year and I'm using it as an excuse to learn the environment. I've always been more impressed with .net and its attendant technologies than I have been with the JVM.
OSS on .net is weird in that commercial pressures and Microsoft's anchoring of the system warp it a bit. Things are located in weird places (codeplex) and discussions happen in weird places. The community is also fairly cut off from the *nix oriented OSS community. I run across stuff randomly that I'm surprised is .net and open source but it's intermittent since I'm mostly in the normal OSS ecosystem and am not particularly well connected to the .net world.
I'm only speaking from experience here. It's just not a community of tinkerers that's on the cutting edge. I can't think of a single exciting .NET open source project. All of the good stuff that I know of in .NET is commercial: Stack Overflow, Unity, umm... anything else? It's a community that waits for the next thing to be handed down from Microsoft.
Show me Heroku for Seaside... now we're talking!
P.S. If anybody wants to show me some vibrant cutting-edge open source projects built on .NET instead of just downvoting, I'd love to know. Thanks!