SharePoint 2010 a Better Investment for Developers than LAMP
Time is Money
Currently, one of the most popular web development platforms is LAMP. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The reason why it is used by so many is that the whole stack is free. Well, sort of... There's a lot of time that gets wasted in the development process for this platform; the tools just simply aren't there.
Fortunately, if you agree that your time is not worthless, you might invest in something like ASP.NET and many of your development pains go away. Unfortunately like LAMP, without a good framework, a good understanding of database design, and great security principles, you're going to be reinventing a wheel which has been picking up steam for a few years now.
The Wheel
SharePoint offers a framework that abstracts away databases and security design, it gives you a complete content management system, a plug-in architecture, and for the price, unmatched scalability. This doesn't even begin to take into account the growing ecosystem of third party features available both for free and fee. The one piece that is missing is developer tools.
The Tools
SharePoint wasn't even given the time of day when Visual Studio 2008 was being put together. Much of the development process made Visual Studio look like an over-glorified version of Notepad. The same cannot be said for Visual Studio 2010. Project templates, build processes, enhanced IntelliSense, wizards, and probably a unicorn or two make developing for SharePoint a reasonable task. What was once a six-step process to deploy and test a solution, is now one button: F5. Deployment speed didn't improve, but at least I can get a can of Coke while my computer does it for me. No batch scripts necessary. More information about the tooling added to Visual Studio for SharePoint 2010 can be found in this post on the .NET Developer's Journal.
In the end, SharePoint 2010 offers a great application stack for developing some very compelling web products, and the tools that the Visual Studio team put together for the upcoming platform makes it very accessible for developers.
