PHP is popular around here, I guess bescause it is maybe faster to learn and everything is free. On the Microsoft side, C# is perhaps a more mature and powerful language, with a great development environment. There are some ways to get Visual Studio without paying too much...you can do quite a bit with ASP.Net, C#, and SQL Server--actually, just about anything. Its a full-powered development stack, C# is now the main windows programming language, so you can go far with it. A better comparison might be C# or Java.