Greetings!

  Hrm, the advantages of IIS7 over Apache? Well, personal preference. Apache is a fine product, quite powerful, and friendly to use up to a point. It is possible to run ASP and ASP.NET sites with Apache, but it takes a bit of effort. With ASP, I think there's no way to serve pages with VBScript, instead the web sites I found talked about using Perl for the scripting language. It's been 10 years since I did any Perl, and I'm not a big PHP developer. Instead I do ASP and ASP.NET very often and I'm more productive with them.

IIS can serve PHP pages, and one can server both ASP, ASP.NET, and PHP at the same time. I'm sure Apache can do all three, but to do the Microsoft stuff it takes a bit of effort to get going.

PostgreSQL is very impressive and mature product compared to MySQL. Of course MySQL is rather powerful too, yet at the time when I researched the differences, MySQL suffers from being weak with transactions. I haven't heard if the folks developing MySQL ever go around to improving that, but I know it was a known issue. PostgreSQL is a different kind of beast when comparing to MySQL. If I were to choose an Open Source database system, it would be PostgreSQL.

My decision to probably use MS SQL is because I'm more familiar with it. There is also practical reasons. I don't think MySQL supports storedprocedures yet, although I heard it was planned for version 5.. but I don't know if they have that worked out yet. 

With MS SQL it's quite easy to do what I need, design what I need, control what I need, quickly. MS SQL is proving to be a very capable product, and it integrates with the other MS products seemlessly. There's a wealth of books at almost any bookstore, and lots of info on the web (of course lots of info on the web for the Open Source stuff too, and quite a bit for MySQL at the local bookstore.)

Anyway, I like it ;-)