“While Microsoft has provided developers with a powerful framework and a bunch of very good tools and packages to build upon, it often feels like too much effort was put into a “one-size-fits-all” design philosophy that can make it complex, tedious, or just plain impossible to do things that don’t follow Microsoft’s prescribed approach.”

I wonder if the difficulty some have with deviating beyond Microsoft’s prescribed approach has more to do with an over dependence on Microsoft’s GUI development tools rather than limitations imposed by languages like C# and supporting .NET libraries. I find these to be excellent tools (aside from their limitation to the Windows OS and yes I know about Mono). I’ve written before on how Visual Studio can sort of force you down certain design paths but there’s nothing saying you can’t fire up you’re favorite text editor and let your imagination run wild. People forget that you can use the compiler at the command line or via tools like NAnt to build whatever you want. It does require greater knowledge and more time but under certain circumstances that’s a good thing because it makes you a better developer.