LOL Your really an Open Source Advocate are you? There are two sides the street. Your on one, I'm on the other. I totally respect that.

I can see why you love open source, and believe me, some of the best .NET tools are open source. But I feel the features of .NET go above and beyond anything thats in PHP right now. .NET is free, just like PHP. .NET is six times as much documented as PHP. .NET is supported by a respected company, and PHP is totally unsuported.

.NET only runs on Windows (well, until Mono finishes). Thats my only complaint. But, then again, its a Windows world. ;-).

Of course lots of non-open source stuff is great, such as Windows, etc. But, things like Linux, PHP, Apache, MySQL, Mozilla/Firebird, etc. are awesome too.

For me, for instance, I like PHP more than ASP, for one reason, because it's opensource

Why do I prefer programming in PHP than ASP.net, because its a beautiful language and its a logical one. I found ASP.net to be very powerful but not as fun to work with than PHP. I also enjoy the fact that it is a portable language and that there are free hosts and there is a very large friendly community.

nb: a good PHP IDE is Nusphere PHPED

I like ASP.NET better over PHP for many reasons, but this has to be one of the greatest: its more optimized. To get PHP to run at its most optimized form, you need to purchase the ZEND Optimizer. ASP.NET code is compiled to the .NET Framework, and its 100% optimized to the fullest out of the box.

What langauge do you use with for Asp.net. Is c# better than VB.net

You can't quite compare C# with VB.net, they're different.

ASP.NET uses ASP.NET doesn't it?

ASP.NET can be written in any .NET language. Personally, I use C#, but its "all ends up looking the same". C# isn't better then VB.NET - its just different. Personally, I prefer it over VB.NET because of the closer relation with Java.

VB.NET I like for doing quick jobs, though. I'd much rather prefer C++ over C#

The syntax between VB.NET and C# is more similar compared to VB.NET and VB6. Most of the languages supported by .NET are OOP. The object oriented methodology has its uses, and I think doing everything, even the most miniscule task, in OOP is a waste. That's why I prefer doing some projects in PHP/ColdFusion than ASP.NET/J2SE.

Of course there are other reasons why I choose a certain language, but I don't want to get into another web language debate. =)

I think they decided to take out the feature of referencing functions through namespaces. You can sort of emulate this still as follows:

[php]
<?
class Arithmetic{
function add($n1, $n2){
return $n1 + $n2;
}
function subtract($n1, $n2){
return $n1 - $n2;
}
}

echo Arithmetic::add(4,5)."<br/>";
echo Arithmetic::subtract(35,6);
?>
[/php]