1. MS advances their product at a semi-decent rate so people just wait for MS to bring out a solution. I don't mean this as a dig, it just seems MS is more plugged into emerging trends in programming. Asp.net MVC came out within a year of Rails and Django becoming popular and lots of MVC frameworks appearing for PHP. I also had just seriously started playing with NHibernate when Linq2Sql and the Entity framework came out. Same with lambdas and all that goodness. They seem to bring stuff out just as people are saying 'hey, this is a really good idea'. I don't see that happening in Java. They get it wrong sometimes, like their over engineered SOAP solution which personally I think contributed to its downfall. Also WCF and WF are both pretty shitty.
2. I think a lot of the other tools is because Java came out first so some of these problems were were already solved when it came to .Net, so we got nant, etc. I personally have never worked on a project where something like Maven seemed worth it comapred to some slight customisations to MSBuild which you can do in VS, so can't comment on that.
You nailed it. The other thing is that .NET devs generally aren't framework devs. They're app devs.
With that said, there are some nice frameworks that exist, but competing against the top framework vendor, Microsoft, is tough. And while most on HN won't understand this, most .NET devs are actually quite happy with what MS is doing -- and most generally feel like MS actually does listen to the dev community.
Is NAnt still around? I thought MSBuild caught the wind and run with it.
I think you're onto something with your statement that Maven might not worth in .NET since there aren't many 3rd party libraries that you would include to your project. That is probably tied to point #1: relying on Microsoft to provide everything.
1. MS advances their product at a semi-decent rate so people just wait for MS to bring out a solution. I don't mean this as a dig, it just seems MS is more plugged into emerging trends in programming. Asp.net MVC came out within a year of Rails and Django becoming popular and lots of MVC frameworks appearing for PHP. I also had just seriously started playing with NHibernate when Linq2Sql and the Entity framework came out. Same with lambdas and all that goodness. They seem to bring stuff out just as people are saying 'hey, this is a really good idea'. I don't see that happening in Java. They get it wrong sometimes, like their over engineered SOAP solution which personally I think contributed to its downfall. Also WCF and WF are both pretty shitty.
2. I think a lot of the other tools is because Java came out first so some of these problems were were already solved when it came to .Net, so we got nant, etc. I personally have never worked on a project where something like Maven seemed worth it comapred to some slight customisations to MSBuild which you can do in VS, so can't comment on that.