Look, I get Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services as a platform.  I get what it is, what it does, and why it's so cool.  Hell, Sleepless in NY was all about MOSS, and it was fun.  But I do need to rant about something.

At Sleepless in NY, Kurt Guenther, in his introductory Sharepoint presentation, characterized MOSS as "Microsoft's Web Platform."  Full stop.  Almost implying that that ASP.NET developers that didn't build on MOSS were an endangered species, that all .NET web development would eventually be done on MOSS.  I don't know if that's what he meant to imply, but that's what I heard.  And I don't buy that.  At least, not when MOSS has such a painful development story right now.

When I'm developing ASP.NET, I make my changes, I do a build, and I debug.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  Once I'm in that rhythm, things progress very quickly.  There's some JIT overhead here and there, but besides that, it's a very smooth process.

When I'm developing on MOSS, however, it's a lot harder.  I make my changes, deploy to my bin folder (or the GAC), sometimes IISReset, wait forever for the whole damn thing to JIT.  And then, when I debug, if I set a breakpoint and leave the code running at a break too long, the entire Sharepoint object model times out or something and turns null, locking up Sharepoint in the process and requiring another IISReset to correct.  What a huge pain in the ass.  And all that's assuming that I'm not dealing with code that requires feature activation or a new site collection to test.  And don't get me started on the cryptic exceptions.  GAH!

So yes, MOSS brings a lot to the table.  Collaboration, search, business intelligence, business forms, workflow, content management, and more.  It's an awesome product.  There's a reason why every headhunter and his brother is looking high and low for MOSS developers right now - they're in high demand.  But until the development story improves, I think I'd prefer to wait before calling myself a MOSS developer.