Owen Winkler put together an overview of all self-installable blogging software, circa mid-2004. After surveying his options, he notes one clear trend:

Even more disheartening… .Text is the only blogware that anyone suggested for the Windows platform. I asked and asked about it because I wanted to give Windows a fair shake. Well, it seems that the only thing that .net developers care about is .net. That is, who cares about the applications you can create with it as long as you have this wonderful language to create them with. I wish them well in ever getting anyone off the ground with .Text, since I couldn't even figure out how to get a copy. Yeah, it was that user-unfriendly.

To be fair, the comparison is a year old, and it doesn't include DasBlog, which is unfortunate. But even after accounting for those factors, the question remains-- why are there so many PHP/MySql solutions for self-install blogging software, and only two for .NET? He makes an interesting observation in a followup post:

I want to like .Text because I'm running on a Windows server. But the fact of the matter is that (as the anonymous commenter above makes an excellent example) the only thing that the .net developers seem to care about is pretty code/pretty language. They don't care if the software works. They don't care if the software is easily installed. They don't care what the software depends on in order to run.

.Text is too complicated for the average user to use. There seem to be different versions of the software depending on what you want. And anyone who is not a developer will have a devil of a time trying to work the gotdotnet workspace. Ick.

The code in WordPress is admittedly a bit messy. But any coder worth his salt (and I'll make this hasty generalization in a heartbeat - not the myriad of erudite but inexperienced VB devs) can easily figure it out.

This leads me to my final conclusion that .net developers (especially those coding blog software) just don't "get it". I'm sure in a few years after everyone is done cooing over .net itself, .net developers will start to focus back on the user instead of how nice their new toy is.

.Text is now Community Server, but I've installed Community Server and I feel this is a valid criticism.

Of course, I'm one to talk, since I am running a WIMP (Windows - IIS - MySql - Perl) blog solution myself. Doh!