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Ask HN: Are there any startups willing to use the ASP.NET Core technology?

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Ask HN: Are there any startups willing to use the ASP.NET Core technology?

#1

Post by techdominator »

Recently, Microsoft has been showing more openness with regards to their products by open sourcing asp.net core and the coreclr runtime for example.

I would like to know if there are actual startups that are using or considering to use these technologies to build their product and services, especially in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area?

If yes how do you manage (or plan to manage) the risks associated with these relatively immature technologies?

If not what are the reasons for a startup to stay away from .NET CORE?

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups willing to use the ASP.NET Core technology?

#3

Post by tiffanyh »

StackOverflow.com [1]

I'm not certain I'd still call them a "startup" but they have been very open about their large use of .NET and the advantages it brings to bear.

[1] http://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-arc...

Edit: More .NET information / usage.

[2] http://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-har...

[3] http://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/05/03/stack-overflow-how-we-...

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups willing to use the ASP.NET Core technology?

#4

Post by graycat »

My startup is based on Windows, the .NET Framework, ASP.NET for Web pages, and ADO.NET for interacting with SQL Server. For the programming language, I'm using Visual Basic .NET -- as Kernighan and Ritchie, IIRC, stated in their C, the lanugage has an idiosyncratic syntax, which it turns ou I don't like. Since C# borrows some of that syntax, I prefer the more traditional (like PL/I, Pascal, Fortran, Algol, etc.) syntax of Visual Basic .NET.

When I selected this collection of tools, I seemed to see that there were some big, famous, successful, busy Web sites using these tools.

So far, I'm pleased with these tools but would like much better technical writing in the documentation.

Some things about the tools are really nice. So far my code is about 100,000 lines of typing and about 25,000 programming language statements. I typed in all the code using my favorite text editor (KEdit) and have made no use of Visual Studio or any other integrated development environment. For me, KEdit and Rexx as a scripting language work fine. For a scripting language, I may convert over to Microsoft's Power Shell, but I see no big need to do that now.

For organizing my work, I make heavy use of the Windows NTFS hierarchical file system -- it looks terrific, like some of Microsoft's and/or the industry's best software.

For the CORE, I have no more than 15 seconds of understanding what the heck that is. AFAIK, I won't be using the CORE, whatever the heck it is.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups willing to use the ASP.NET Core technology?

#5

Post by kminehart »

Since it's been an hour and there hasn't been much response, I'll give my two cents.

I don't work for a startup. However, I do work in a small team of 3 developers, and have recently been faced with the decision of choosing a technology stack to start from scratch.

Before this decision, we were using PHP5; we were constantly putting out fires and couldn't ever get any actual work done because of this awful inherited codebase.

WARNING: OPINIONS AHEAD.

We decided to not go the .NET route for a few reasons.

Object-Oriented programming doesn't have a place in our hearts, as it does with a many OO-only developers. I find that object-oriented code is overly verbose and often difficult to maintain. For these reasons, we also wanted to avoid PHP, Java, and node.js. I feel like object oriented programming is more of an obstacle I have to overcome than a feature.

I hate to say it, but I just don't trust Microsoft. Yes, .NET on Linux is incredibly fast. How many years down the road until Microsoft decides to try getting their new Linux user-base onto Windows? They've done similar things before, and it'll take more than a year of a "Microsoft Not only that, but .NET core hasn't been on Linux for a very long time. There isn't as much documentation that I can find on running, deploying, and maintaining a .NET / Linux application as many other technologies. (note: I could be wrong here after some more research, it's been out for a couple years, which is probably enough time).

We decided to go with Golang. It's a statically typed language that treats functions as first class citizens. It's not object oriented, doesn't have exceptions (yay), has an amazing standard library (including testing and benchmarking!), is easy to deploy (compiled & doesn't depend on a runtime like JVM or .NET core), and I feel like it's working with me, not against me. Plus half of our stack is already in Go (docker & kubernetes, and now Tyk).

I know that so many of you will absolutely disagree with me and that's fine. I'm not here to start fights, just giving my two cents. :)

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups willing to use the ASP.NET Core technology?

#6

Post by keithwarren »

Not a startup...but I do know of (I am consulting for them on the project) an established SaaS company that is impressively large and successful in their vertical that is porting from PHP/Postgres to ASP.net core and running it all on Azure

Biggest pain so far is the versioning FUD around .Net core, standard etc. That said, it is not really an issue.

From a risk mitigation perspective we are trying to lean on some other established and long tested things like Dapper as a micro-orm and staying away from fluid elements that we really want to use like SignalR until they settle down some.

We also went as green field as we could, no attempt to port code in the classic sense, ground up rewrite.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups willing to use the ASP.NET Core technology?

#7

Post by jpobst »

I work for a very mature startup, and recently led our first site on ASP.NET Core. The framework itself is very nice and very solid, basically a "do-over" of all the previous ASP.NET frameworks with the benefit of hindsight. Although there's been some new things to learn, I've been very pleased with how consistent and thought out the new ASP.NET Core is. We run the site in production.

Having said that, the tooling around ASP.NET Core has been an absolute disaster. They went 90% of the way with one mechanism (project.json), then decided to start over with a new mechanism (msbuild). While I believe it is ultimately for the best, the interim has been incredibly difficult to work with, as ASP.NET has been officially released now for ~8 months with neither method fully working. For example, in the current project.json stuff you cannot reference another project without first putting it into a Nuget pacakge.

Hopefully this will all be cleared up with the upcoming release of VS2017, but if you need something sooner and aren't interested in dealing with a lot of pain, I'd stick to ASP.NET classic for now.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups willing to use the ASP.NET Core technology?

#8

Post by jpobst »

jpobst wrote: post #7

I work for a very mature startup, and recently led our first site on ASP.NET Core. The framework itself is very nice and very solid, basically a "do-over" of all the previous ASP.NET frameworks with the benefit of hindsight. Although there's been some new things to learn, I've been very pleased with how consistent and thought out the new ASP.NET Core is. We run the site in production. Having said that, the tooling ar…

Forgot to mention I also ported my personal side project to ASP.NET Core and had the same experience, it's a fairly decent sized live site.

https://communiroo.com

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups willing to use the ASP.NET Core technology?

#9

Post by kogir »

> If not what are the reasons for a startup to stay away from .NET CORE?

I've been using .Net for over 10 years now, and just launched a new product on Asp.Net Web API + SQL Server + Orleans.

Whatever Microsoft says, .Net Core is not at all ready. The tooling and libraries are still undergoing major (and breaking) changes. You'll spend more time debugging it than your own code.

I (foolishly) tried to adopt it a year ago (RC), and again six months ago (1.0). Each time I ran into a critical bugs and omissions.

.Net Core will probably, eventually be great. It isn't yet.

Edit: Here's an example of the fun you'll have, published today: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/01/30/announcin...

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups willing to use the ASP.NET Core technology?

#10

Post by UK-AL »

I work in ex-startup(as in it's now highly profitable and successful for quite a few years) using traditional .net on azure.

.Net core has been in quite a bit of flux recently, so we've been avoiding it. However I the next year or so, I think we are going to adopt it.

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