I like Web API a lot and would have no problems using it more. I've never messed around with SignalR, I had already started playing with Node at that point.
As I mentioned, but didn't elaborate on, in my first post I had an urgent need to fix a production problem as quickly as possible. But the service giving us the problems was opaque, and encumbered by these massive 100+ project .NET solutions that had grown unwieldy for rapid development.
Being able to kick VS+TFS and their ceremony to the curb and hack out a solution with Node and Sublime Text was liberating. But it wasn't really VS I had a problem with, it was paying the price for years of technical debt. That's why I'm excited, I still think VS is a great IDE for my .NET work.
One other final reason I wanted to use Node was because I felt for someone that considered himself to be a "web developer" I was abnormally shitty at javascript and wanted to know it better :)
I do like dynamic languages for quick prototypes, but my experience on the scale of enterprise projects and their code quality, just increased my preference for static typing for production code.
Basically the important bit to remember when using dynamic languages in production is that you have to be extremely serious about writing (good) tests. It’s easy to get lazy when using a statically typed language as the compiler will do much of the work for you (especially if you take full advantage of the type system’s features). You can’t get away with that when writing e.g. JavaScript.
Enterprise developers don't write tests if their managers don't force them to, gets specially hairy when you have multiple consulting companies across multiple sites.
So you get JavaScript/Ruby/Python code with zero tests.
