Earlier this year I would not be writing this, but my experience in a large business environment has really opened my eyes to enterprise development.

PHP is a junk application, it is a resource hog and maintained by volunteers (experienced, but volunteers non the less). It does not come with any real support, blogs and forums are your only option if you have an issue, you are on your own if you discover a bug in the language.

While many of Microsoft's solutions leave something to be desired, their business solutions are simply amazing. IIS is a great server platform and SQL server is excelent. While classic ASP is not as good as PHP due to its age, ASP.net is a great language. Microsoft solutions also come with support and the enormous MSDN database that documents the language extensively and has a huge array of common problems and issues. Microsoft has the majority of the enterprise web sector for a reason. While *NIX solutions are much cheaper, they just don't come as good as Microsoft's systems. For example, say a company is looking to use Visual Studio Test Edition for their testing, Microsoft will send out a representative to your office to show you it and pitch a better sale than buying it online (bargains). Microsft even sells solutions where you can call them with questions about things (eg. how would I do this with asp.net) and they will do what they can to answer it. You just dont get this with *NIX services. The catch is Microsoft is not cheap, their prices take them out of range of the majority of personal users. Their market is business and that is what they stick to.

Lastly, Probably 90% of PHP programmers are just amatures who took on the cheapest option they could find. That was my case. Their reputation in the real business world is very low. Due to this fact, PHP programmers are worth a lot less than programmers who work in Microsoft languages.

Many of the people who say PHP is the best out of the bunch have probably never worked in a larger business environment. This was my case at the time I casted my vote for PHP.

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