Visual Studio 2005
 

Beta 2 just released a week ago.

Don't want to try it myself as Microsoft doesn't recommend ASP 1.1 and 2 on the same machine, but I am drooling at the new features.

Anyone here taken the plunge??

Better fire up frontpage and get cracking

Yeah, its been pretty stable for me so far, well the 32bit is working fine, i have been unable to get 64bit working

fair point - the html generation engine in VS is the same as FrontPage and therefore total dogshit. But the programming side absolutely rocks

aye, the VS 2005 IDE is fucking sick, in a good way

Is it on PHP's level when it comes to speed and stability?

Speed yes (although I don't know this for sure as benchmarks are very unreliable in Beta), stability almost certainly not, but I can't really see the problem on that as it is still a very marginal downtime (really from the instability of the windows OS). I run a few ASP.NET sites and have had a few hours down in the year on a budget host.

It is really on the productivity that the model comes into its own. Example, programming an XML webservice took about 2 hours (including debugging) with no prior knowledge of webservices.

In my experience, .NET has been faster and about just as reliable as PHP

You can get the beta free w/ free shipping to the US for free here http://getthebetas.com/profile.aspx