Pick a platform, pick a language, pick a religion.  I've seen two different kinds of responses to the 101 Reasons nonsense. 

1. An item by item refuting.  You might as well start dissecting the commandments.

2. A larger essay with lavish prose and a general "I'm taking the high road" attitude.

These are all fine and good I'm sure, but I'm tired.  I would no sooner argue these points than I would argue the pros and cons of Islam vs. Christianity vs. Judaism.  These are all religions based on the God of Abraham.  They are 98% identical and their few  differences are syntactic sugar! (Sound like any popular programming paradigms you know?)

Currently I architect applications for banks at the most successful Windows-provider of eFinance Solutions in the world.  We happen to use .NET.  We also happen to integrate happily with dozens of mainframes, J2EE solutions, Tandems, and all sorts of other stuff.  In the past I worked at Nike programming Java on Solaris talking to a DB2 DB on a Hitatchi Mainframe, and hacking C code on embedded systems.  Personally, my happiness is usually related to whether I'm programming in a managed environment or not. 

Java is here to stay.  .NET is here to stay.  The point is, the future is managed code.  The VAST majority of business componentry of any use in 2005 will be written using managed code.  Today, the majority of the worlds religions have their roots in the God of Abraham.  Pick a religion, be excited about it.  Tell your friends, even those of other religions, but for God's sake, don't nit-pick their belief system.

Scott's Quasi-Religious Thought for Wednesday: "Don't player-hate, integrate."

Try these from the Visual Studio.NET Command Prompt:

            devenv /?
            devenv.exe /?
            devenv

devenv /? shows the options in command line.
devenv.exe /? shows the options in GUI.
devenv launches ide without options

What's happening is when you execute devenv /? (no extension, remember order of precedence BAT, COM, EXE) you are executing devenv.com. Without /?, devenv.com will just chain to devenv.exe.

Here's my which.exe output:

WHICH, Version 1.31
UNIX-like WHICH utility for Windows NT 4 / 2000 / XP
Written by Rob van der Woude
C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio .NETCommon7IDEdevenv.com
C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio .NETCommon7IDEdevenv.exe

And here's devenv.com from the Command Line:

C:Program Files>devenv /?

Microsoft (R) Development Environment  Version 7.00.9466.
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-2001. All rights reserved.

Usage:
devenv  [solutionfile | projectfile | anyfile.ext]  [switches]

You can invoke devenv with a first argument to specify a solution file or
project file.  You can also invoke devenv with a first argument that is any
other kind of file that you just want to open in an editor.  When you supply a
project file, the IDE opens it in the context of a solution by looking for a
.sln file with the same base name as the project file in the same
directory as the project file.  If no such .sln file exists, then the IDE
looks for a single .sln file that references the project.  If no such single
.sln file exists, then the IDE creates an unsaved solution with a default .sln
file name that has the same base name as the project file.

Command line builds:
devenv solutionfile.sln  /build solutionconfig [ /project projectnameorfile [ /p
rojectconfig name ] ]

Available command line switches:

/build          build the specified solution configuration
/project        specifies the project to build instead of solution
                must specify /build to use /project
/projectconfig  specifies project configuration to build
                must specify /project to use /projectconfig
/out            write build output to specified file
/rebuild        like /build but forces a clean first
/clean          clean up build outputs
/deploy         build the specified solution configuration and then deploy it
/run            run the specified solution configuration
/runexit        run the specified solution configuration and then terminate
/command        executes the specified internal command line after startup
/mditabs        use tabbed documents interface
/mdi            use MDI interface
/fn             use specified font name
/fs             use specified font size
/LCID           use specified language ID
/noVSIP         disables VSIP developers license key for VSIP testing
/safemode       only default environment and services load for stability
/resetskippkgs  allow VsPackages once flagged for loading failures to
                load again

Product-specific switches:

/debugexe       Open the specified executable to be debugged. The
                remainder of the command line is passed to this
                executable as its arguments.
/useenv         Use PATH, INCLUDE, LIBPATH, and LIB environment variables
                instead of IDE paths for VC++ builds.