.Net started really changing for me with the introduction of the DLR. I maintain an application with a pretty large codebase (around 1.1 or 1.2 million LOC, it's been a year or so since I've really looked) and I wanted to change out the scripting engine we used. It used to be this VBA monstrosity, but it was ridiculously easy to change over to using Python via IronPython. It took 2 lines of code, plus another 15 or 20 lines to specify what I wanted to expose to the scripting engine. It was incredible!<p>I don't mind aspx all that much, but I see what you're saying about keeping things separated. I've never been fond of IIS and I don't see that opinion changing in the immediate future. mod_mono seems interesting, but I haven't really looked at it at all.<p>To me, the biggest win about the .net stack is the tooling; I know people like to bag on it, but the .net debugger in Visual Studio is seriously great. We maintain that huge application I was talking about with 2 developers and it's really no problem because it's very easy for us to track down bugs when they crop up - we spend 80% or more of our time on new development.<p>I'm still on a Clojure kick, so I'm avoiding F# for the time being just so I can maintain some sanity, but it's next on my language list for sure.<p>As an aside, weren't you going to be doing semi-regular posts to HN about your startup? I think you're overdue ;)