Evan,

>I've heard While mention this many times. Is there any proof of this?

As a Wrox author I received all of the legal documents and financial information when Wrox went belly up...it really was an issue of the parent company having financial problems, rather than a problem selling .NET books. If it were the .NET books themselves, why would two other publishing companies come in and snatch them up? There were certainly some books that weren't picked up by these two companies, but that was to be expected in any kind of acquisition. Wrox sold a lot of .NET books...some were great and some were bad and some were in between. I travel about every other week and visit many different companies...there's a LOT of red books on developers shelves <g>.

Whil has had tremendous success selling Linus books...and he's found a great niche...and I agree with his premise that he wouldn't have been able to make it in the .NET world...it would be extremely difficult for a small publisher to compete for shelf space.

However, I definitely disagree with his conclusions about .NET in general. From where I stand as a .NET Framework vendor I see a tremendous number of people moving to .NET on a daily basis. It was slow at first, but it's a tidal wave now...and what's great is, once developers have spent 2-3 months at it and get comfortable, they've really enjoyed working with the languages and the .NET Framework itself. Personally, I'm having a blast <s>. There's something to be said for strongly typed languages and advanced object-oriented features. There are definitely some low points with .NET, but that's true with every MS product. But overall, lots of companies are having great success with this toolset.

Regards,