Scott Hanselman posted a quick, one question survey about what frameworks and platforms that they use while they develop applications in the Microsoft .Net Framework...
You should know that I used to be a .Net Developer and am now a Ruby Developer (with Objective-C and Erlang envy)... so I took the survey. And granted in the timeline that I was a .Net Developer, these technologies and platforms were in their infancy (some still are)... but I feel as if I would only use a small handful of them... Let's break down each one.
ASP.NET Web Forms - Worst implementation ever. Seriously. Not focused on how the web works.
ASP.NET Dynamic Data - Good ground start, but too many requirements to use.
ADO.NET DataSets - Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.
CardSpace - Who uses this? :)
Linq To SQL - Yay, let's abstract ugly syntax in code with more SQL focused syntax.
ASP.NET AJAX - Terrible, you shouldn't be using it. You should be doing jQuery or proto
ADO.NET Data Services - Potentially useful, more people should be playing with this.
Win Forms - Solid, used it for many years... wish it were MVC forced, but it's solid.
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) -
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) - Good idea, tough as nails to learn and use.
Entity Framework - no comment
ASP.NET MVC - diamond in the rough... what ASP.Net should have been from the get-go
ASMX - Bleh.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) - too heavy, too involved...
Now it may feel like I did a lot of bashing there, but in all honesty... to make me feel like a competent developer who writes well maintainable code, I only used the frameworks that allowed me to do so... There are some very smart guys in this section of the market and at Microsoft. Things will get better... I just hope that the tool sets continue to let developers be creative and intelligent... and let them make the right decisions on how to build a solid system.
Until then... I have other things to worry about
assert_equal 2.days.from_now, Becca.birth_date
So yeah, I'm on the same page as you with this stuff.