I'm not an expert with the Microsoft stack, but aren't there ways to mitigate the costs? I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. What other costs are there specific to the Microsoft stack?
How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
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Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
#12As an MS developer this really is devastating. Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked there (I'd call him the most high profile MS employee aside from Scott Guthrie). To have him come out and say he couldn't make a startup work with Microsoft technology really tells you all you need to know about that. I still need to use .Net at work but I think…
It has nothing to do with the technology - it's good stuff and we could have made it work fine. The issue is we want to stay small and not take on the associated cost. I can see how it might come off like I'm damning the platform - that was hardly my intention. Rails has had 3+ years of Open Source contribution to build out the platform and make it do amazing things - ASP.NET MVC will (hopefully) grow in some of the…
My point really was only part technical though. To give an example you had to switch from Silverlight for a completely nontechnical reason. It wasn't even expense related.
But you still had to switch and it still cost you time and money you wouldn't need to spend had you just gone with Flash in the first place. So the point to me is still "don't use Microsoft technology because you'll end up needing to switch"
Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
#13As an MS developer this really is devastating. Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked there (I'd call him the most high profile MS employee aside from Scott Guthrie). To have him come out and say he couldn't make a startup work with Microsoft technology really tells you all you need to know about that. I still need to use .Net at work but I think…
A lot of developers and managers I work with don't seem to realize that what's best for Microsoft isn't necessarily what's best for another company. Instead they get stuck in a cycle of adopting whatever MS throws down the channel (this week it's Entity Framework, last week SOA concepts, etc.).
Good MS developers should learn to take what's best from the open source world and apply whatever is most useful behind the corporate firewall.
Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
#14I'm not an expert with the Microsoft stack, but aren't there ways to mitigate the costs? I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. What other costs are there specific to the Microsoft stack?
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Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has nothing to do with the technology - it's good stuff and we could have made it work fine. The issue is we want to stay small and not take on the associated cost. I can see how it might come off like I'm damning the platform - that was hardly my intention. Rails has had 3+ years of Open Source contribution to build out the platform and make it do amazing things - ASP.NET MVC will (hopefully) grow in some of the…
My point really was only part technical though. To give an example you had to switch from Silverlight for a completely nontechnical reason. It wasn't even expense related. But you still had to switch and it still cost you time and money you wouldn't need to spend had you just gone with Flash in the first place. So the point to me is still "don't use Microsoft technology because you'll end up needing to switch"
Can't argue with that. Outside the corporate walls money is king - it's a hard truth and one I was not about to pay for personally :).
Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
We actually use MySQL as a transaction log for things like orders/views to balance that out, MongoDB stores everything else though.
Gotcha, that works, and was mentioned in passing. Mongo still makes me nervous, but otherwise looks very promising.
Our writes to Mongo are few and far between - otherwise I'd be nervous too :)
Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
#17I'm not an expert with the Microsoft stack, but aren't there ways to mitigate the costs? I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. What other costs are there specific to the Microsoft stack?
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What he's getting at (I think) is that, you could work around that by using Mono on a linux server, Postgres, MonoDevelop, so on..
Though I wouldn't go down that route personally, so I agree with you.
Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
What he's getting at (I think) is that, you could work around that by using Mono on a linux server, Postgres, MonoDevelop, so on.. Though I wouldn't go down that route personally, so I agree with you.
Didn't mean to delete my earlier comment. Actually I'm glad he asked the question, because I wasn't aware .Net MVC could be made to work under Mono until I looked it up.
Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
#19I'm not an expert with the Microsoft stack, but aren't there ways to mitigate the costs? I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. What other costs are there specific to the Microsoft stack?
I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...
Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL
#20As an MS developer this really is devastating. Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked there (I'd call him the most high profile MS employee aside from Scott Guthrie). To have him come out and say he couldn't make a startup work with Microsoft technology really tells you all you need to know about that. I still need to use .Net at work but I think…
As a long time former .NET consultant (been using it since Beta 1), once I went OSS, it was nigh impossible to return to Windows land. Right now I'm the CTO for a largish image licensing shop (think Getty, but more boutique/high end) that is entirely .NET (I inherited it). We are now in the process of moving it off Windows onto an OSS stack. It's a miserable experience. And an expensive one.
Could you elaborate why it was a "miserable experience?" Was it because of the way it was written or the framework / stack itself?