I am always amazed how little usage of C# exists at large sites, but
PHP is widely used.
I find C# good.
In an intruders.tv interview, Ali from iLike talks a lot of
scalability and when I checked the site I saw it uses PHP, like many
sites.
I've worked for 4 companies since 2001 (the original beta period for .NET)
that have adopted the .NET platform completely (either C# or VB.NET or
C++/CLI). Three of them grew to to well over 100 million review annually or
were already there, but grew into or beyond the billion mark. Three of them
were/are public facing websites but are more-or-less, web applications, and
are targeted towards business users of a particular market sector and not
generally publicly available. With the exception of my current employer for
whom I'm an Architect, is available for general consumption.
In one of my previous employers, where ASP classic was used as a front for
the customers, .NET was heavily used internally.
But to use C# implies a certain amount of expense (usually Windows Servers,
SQL Server (generally speaking for the common scenario), MSDN licenses). I
haven't worked for many $100+ million companies that use the Express edition
(of SQL or Visual Studio) n their developer workstations.
Using PHP and/or Linux along with MySQL or PostGRE SQL is certainly a lot
more cost-effective way to enter the market. PHP has a large following, and
has proven itself for a certain robustness.
However, in the places where I have worked (or do work), there is so much
more than just a web portal. There are HUGE entire back-ends that PHP is
not suitable for. I would imagine (and have no concrete data to back it up)
that they might be using something like Java or C++ in the back-ends (if PHP
on the front). Java isn't always cheap, either (can be, just as .NET can be
cheap).
So my point? I don't have much of a point in the sense that the OP didn't
have much of a solid point. Just that there are other reasons why a company
might choose PHP over C# (economics being one of them, ease of finding
talent in their locale being another, or just originator's preference).
There is PHP.NET as well (Phalanger -- if they would update it) for that
matter.
C# is much more likely to be prevalent on internal systems, large
distributed back-end systems, or some types of customer facing portals
(likely in the same places where Java would be equally valuable -- give or
take some features that Java has adopted that .NET has not). But for the
vast majority of the web, I would expect PHP to be the prevailing force due
to the fact that by its cost and availability, more people are able to use
it and consequently prefer it when they become decision makers (where know
CTO is available yet to make the decision for them --- I say in jest).
