FREE CSHARP
When you have no choice but to do web development on IIS/Windows; CSharp .Net is the way to do it.
And you don't have to buy Visual Studio in order to do it. I'm NOT Anti Microsoft, but wish they would stop being so hyper- market driven and settle down to write the solid OS's, Tools and Applications they're capable of writing.
Then, I might spend more money on what they have to offer; but for now:
Probably owing to pressure from the open source movement; Microsoft is now giving away their compilers and toolkits. The only catch is that none of it is integrated into a nice package like Visual Studio. You're at the command line. And we all know the Windows command line generates considerable negative pressure (read sucks). They also have an open community product called Web Matrix, that does a pretty good job of building .net websites. It is not nearly as complete as Visual Studio, and doesn't follow the same coding or deployment standard.
In addition, there's a development studio out there that does CSharp forms and services development, but as of yet, not asp.net. It's name is SharpDevelop.
Also, for non-window platforms there is the MONO project, which is a complete open source implementation to .Net.
With all of these tools, it's possible to develop .Net without having to fork money over to Microsoft. Looky at Microsofts Sales pitch here:
Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional Special Edition is Here
For a limited time, developers can upgrade to the NEW Special Edition for only US $549! The addition of Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 make this an ideal Web application development platform.
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional Special Edition enables developers to quickly create data-driven Web applications using familiar Visual Basic techniques and dozens of reusable, browser-independent Web controls. Web applications built using Visual Studio .NET and ASP.NET benefit from improved performance, reliability, security, and scalability.
*Estimated Retail Price. Reseller prices may vary
Spending 549 for what? Basically, Integration of stuff
they give away for free anyway at the above links - an OS (a
variant of which you already have or you wouldn't be reading
this) - and a database I wouldn't recommend.. I have
considerable experience with SQL Server, and find that it takes
considerable administration and performance tuning to keep it going. I recommend MySQL
instead - on MS Windows! It's free. It's faster than SQL Server, with
virtually zero administrative overhead to keep it going. There is
even a .Net data provider.
I also recommend PostgreSQL, which also has a .net data provider. PostgreSQL is astonishingly stable and fast.
It's as full featured as ORACLE.
It supports Object Databases and GIS Spatial information natively.
I haven't tested it on Windows, but on Linux, I have developed applications that have run for YEARS with no maintenance whatsoever.
I'll detail below how I have done various projects with MySQL on Windows and written ASP.Net using SharpDevelop and WebMatrix.