DISQUS

I read the original article, and it's apparent that the author has either never actually used ASP.NET, or hasn't properly researched a number of claims made in the article.

Database Access
The author states that .NET forces you to use an ODBC driver. In fact, .NET ships with optimized data providers for ODBC, OleDB, SQL Server, and Oracle. The data framework is interface-based and extensible, meaning that you can write optimized drivers for other database backends. Open source drivers are available for MySQL (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/1....), PostgreSQL (http://npgsql.projects.postgresql.org/), and other data sources.

Execution Speed
Artem is correct - .NET pages are compiled to intermediate language, and then machine language the first time they are accessed. The compiled page is then cached as a DLL for subsequent requests. Contrast this with PHP which must parse and interpret the page for every request.

Environment
You can certainly get .NET running under Apache without having to proxy requests to IIS (http://weblogs.asp.net/israelio/archive/2005/09...).

Cost
The .NET runtime, compiler, and SDK are available as a freely redistributable download, and there are a number of freely available development environments (SharpDevelop or MonoDevelop on Linux, Eclipse plugin). If you want to run .NET apps on a Linux server and avoid all licensing costs you can always go with Mono as Artem mentioned.

Although I'm primarily a .NET developer I'm not really advocating one technology or the other. Just make sure that you're making your decisions based on accurate information.