Im looking to upgrade a site of mine, but everytime i interview a developer, i hear different stories why different platforms are better than the rest.. So what is the best, and the future pick of all?? appreciate feedback..thx
Look at it this way. .NET only runs on Windows. The most used server on the internet is Linux and BSD. Stuff written for *nix and BSD runs everywhere and you don't have to worry about things disappearing on you---like Microsoft's announced "change in direction" with Silverlight today.
Then you missed my point. Silverlight might no longer be part of Microsoft's "cross platform" strategy and might only be targeted at Windows Phone. iow, Silverlight just might disappear in a few years off the desktop and the internet and only be available for the phone. Since Windows Phone is virtually unused in the market place, I'd consider Silverlight dead. Link However, HTML5 and all the *nix/BSD tools are now and will be forever available on all platforms for free. Choose wisely.
Other than via the Mono project so .Net also runs on Linux, Mac, Solaris, BSD and Android, to name but a few. To the OP - your list of "platforms" are slightly wrong as .Net compares to PHP where as Drupal, wordpress etc are written in PHP (Umbraco would be an equiv for .Net) A good test of a developer is to get them to say what the weaknesses of their chosen tools are/ what the advantages of the others are. Being able to give the other side of the coin shows a rounded knowledge and the fact they aren't just fanboys. To answer your actual question, there isn't one "best" otherwise there would only be one. We prefer developing in .Net over PHP for a variety of reasons but in other ways PHP has its advantages too.
No self respecting programmer would use Mono on *nix/BSD. And using Mono means using something with the same problems of Silverlight. In addition, Microsoft does not directly support Mono and it is a number of revisions behind .NET. I don't know anyone who uses Mono or would use it. .NET is not a language but, again, PHP runs everywhere and there is no concern that any one company will abandon it. Microsoft has substantially changed .NET just over the last six years and are in the process of deprecating Silverlight. Don't let that happen to you.
I doubt anyone would sit down and decide to write something from scratch for *nix for distribution and choose to use the Mono framework. However, there are a lot of applications written for Windows which can be easily ported to *nix by using Mono, and certainly on my netbook there are more than a few apps there that use it (plus the silverlight port that uses Mono) Any programming language/ framework can be stopped being supported by their creators. Agree with a commercial product then it is slightly more likely but that doesn't make it defunct, there are still millions of sites running classic ASP even though developement on the language and tools was depreciated a long long time ago. I am confused why material steps forward in a programming language is a bad thing? I think it is good that, for example, doing a 301 redirect is now simply response.redirect("newaddress.aspx") rather than the 4 lines it used to be. But what is "best" is the fact the old method is still fully supported so if you want to use the old code you can, if you want to use the newer more efficient code, you can. I'd guess you are using PHP 5 these days too and not still on version 1?