I actually have pretty good experience with interoperability. I run PHP/MySQL to handle http://katg.com and that gets a good amount of traffic to it. The site runs vbulletin just fine.

Did you have problems integrating the software because MS was limiting or the software code you bought was?

Also, Windows just plain sucks as a web server. IIS is nightmare (I've had to deal with it in the past) when trying to do anything but the Microsoft way, and the tools can get expensive. Emacs beats visual studio hands down, IMHO. LISP macros, any language under the sun, and it is open source so I can tinker with it (which I do).

I had a job where they used SQL Server exclusively and a few other Microsoft technologies. It all worked very well with some cool bells and whistles, but, it only worked when done the Microsoft way, or with Microsoft tools.

I also had a job (we were a PHP shop, exclusively) where the silly CEO bought some software from some dude that was built entirely on VB/IIS/SQL Server. We had to integrate it with our product which was PHP/Apache/MySQL. I won't get into the story, that statement should be enough.

Microsoft's technology will never be on par with the community's because their business model depends upon LIMITING interoperability and choice.

By the way, I think PHP does suck, even though it is my primary marketable skill. The language I prefer to program web applications with is Python a more powerful scripting language than anything MSFT can offer plus libraries MSFT can't beat. It's also open source.

I'm not up to date on all of this, so excuse me if my information is wrong or outdated.