From time to time I run into a prospective client who wants their project done in .NET because its the "standard."  I would greatly appreciate any and all suggestions as to how to deal with the objection to using a product like EWB.  References to compelling articles related to Javascript vs .NET would also be welcome.

Doug,

<< From time to time I run into a prospective client who wants their project done in .NET because its the "standard."  I would greatly appreciate any and all suggestions as to how to deal with the objection to using a product like EWB.  References to compelling articles related to Javascript vs .NET would also be welcome. >>

.NET isn't used for writing single-page web applications, at least by itself.  Therefore, the two aren't even in the same development category.  .NET still requires the use of JS for dealing with the front-end application that runs in the browser.

In other words, with EWB, you could still use .NET *on the back end*.  So, if they have a bunch of existing .NET code that they would want to use, they can still keep it on the back end and not have to re-code it.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Some customer of mine has the same question.
My answer is: do you want reinvent the wheel?
Some consultant write all client app by hand to this customer.
In fact, in MS VS you can integrate rich client application within a more complex project where data providing is done by a back end running on windows servers written, for instance, in C#.
In my experience, you have to write by hand a big part of your JS rich client with problems connected to solve browser problems (versions, bug, different behaviour, and so on).
If the back end is a standard, you can write it with a .net language and with a free library like JSON.NET, communicate with EWB.
You can obtain quick (but very, very quick) demo that could be used to enforce customer requirements and/or  apply test driven development and close quickly the development cycle.