What I mean is that .NET as a culture and ecosystem is not full of people who embrace leading edge. Though, since you bring it up, as far as features it still isn't leading anything, just following reasonably close to a lot of others.

Again, I disagree. It is full of people who embrace the leading edge. Just look at the IronRuby early adopters, or the folks who embraced WCF and WPF. This seems like your perception of thingS, not reality.

A vast, vast minority of the whole are early adopters. How many .NET shops actually use IronRuby or even F#.

Besides, I'm not sure what's so leading edge about bringing Ruby to .NET. Ruby is 10 years old and Java has had an implementation for much longer. I also have no idea what is leading edge about WCF (or WPF for that matter) though I really like the work Glenn Block has done recently for WCF and much of it is arguably very cutting edge REST stuff, so there are certainly exceptions, but they are just that exceptions.

If you're point is that MS shops are quick to embrace MS christened technologies, well that is relatively speaking true. However MS is often well behind the technology curve of even the .NET open source community (monorail predates MVC significantly) and generally speaking even further behind the ecosystems outside of .NET.

Bottom line, I see no evidence to support a claim that .NET development supports a significant culture of early adopters.

That's OK, because I don't see any evidence to support a claim that .NET development does not support a significant culture of early adopters :-)

My point wasn't actually that Microsoft shops embrace Microsoft products quickly. You said that .NET doesn't have a vibrant ecosystem, but in the same breath mentioned that Monorail was implemented well before Microsoft created ASP.NET MVC. Ecosystem does not necessarily mean "vendor supplied", if anything a healthy software development ecosystem allows for alternative modules and frameworks. You have sort of proven my point :-)

As for IronRuby and F#, you seem to be asking a question to prove your point that very few people have adopted these technologies. For myself, I guess I'm not sure either - I would be curious to see if these technologies have been adopted by many .NET developers.

Also, you are contradicting yourself a little about the WCF technology. You can't say that there is no real cutting edge stuff being done, but then state that there is cutting edge work being done on REST, but that it's just an exception. "Cutting edge", by definition, is exceptional...

As to whether there are many early adopters: I guess we'll agree to disagree!

I'm contradicting nothing. Saying that .NET is largely a culture of old-school thinking, isn't the same is saying it's all that way. Relative to the overall software development community it has always been a good few steps behind and lacked in true support and adoption of open source culture and the benefits it brings. While more recently this has started to change for Microsoft, many have seen moves like Nuget as undermining open source through taking over fledgling projects rather than simply supporting them.

While the .NET open source eco-system is arguably decent, you've completely ignored two implied, but obvious points. The open source eco-systems outside of .NET are much, much stronger and people outside of .NET embrace open source, and leading edge far more easily.

That's really the whole argument and you've said nothing to contradict it, but feel free to ignore it. As a former contributor to Nancy and one of the rare .NET devs who's contributed a patch or two to almost every .NET project on Github I've used, I feel pretty comfortable making these observations.

Whoa, peace! I haven't ignored your points, only disagreed with them. I agree that the .NET open source ecosystems are probably not as "strong" as other frameworks, but this doesn't mean that they aren't doing interesting or leading edge things.

Agreed that people outside of .NET embrace open source more easily, but disagree that they don't embrace leading edge technologies. As an example, when LINQ was released, it was widely taken up.

Where I'm disagreeing with you was in your statement "the .NET ecosystem and culture is notoriously corporate, and not very innovative or leading edge". It may well be a framework loved by corporations ("notorious" is an emotive term with no substance), but you haven't proven to me that they don't innovate or that the ecosystem or culture is not leading edge. I appreciate you've committed to .NET projects, which is awesome, but argument through authority isn't really anything to disprove what I've said!

Sorry if you feel that I've ignored your points, but I raised LINQ as just one example, you dismissed Microsoft's embracement of dynamic languages in the framework and WPF and WCF aren't innovative apparently. Like I say, we can agree to disagree!

Edit: I've reread the thread, and I can see the bone of contention. My fault here: I talked merely about the leading edge technologies, whereas I was objecting more to the assertion that there was little or a minority of innovation. Of course, I didn't actually state that so the discussion went on a bit of a tangent. Sorry about that!