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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

#91

Post by jasonkester »

matwood wrote: post #33
robconery wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out). Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people. I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/…

What did a full license of VS give you over just using the Express versions of the tools? From what I've seen unless you have a huge team and need the team features you could probably get by using the express versions. I do agree with that the SQL server licensing is a huge PITA and in your case you really didn't need all its ancillary features and instead just needed a simple, fast data store. The article was a grea…

Express -> VS.NET is an improvement on the order of Notepad -> Eclipse. (Or Eclipse to VS.NET, for that matter).

If you're developing on the MS stack, you simply need VS.NET and ReSharper or you'll be wasting hours of your life every week.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#92

Post by Artemidoros »

jawngee wrote: post #74
pbz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate why it was a "miserable experience?" Was it because of the way it was written or the framework / stack itself?

A combination of a lot of things. For starters, the thing is architected poorly, so that does play a big factor in it. I know, I know, it's always the new guy inheriting an existing system that lays to claim that the inherited thing is a piece of garbage, but in this case it is undeniably true. And I can tell you, as someone who has been doing .NET consulting for the last 8+ years, it's not uncommon for MS based solu…

You see, MS is chock full of shitty architecture. And MS devs learn from MS.

Do you have an idea why this is the case? Or the other way around why the architecture of OSS projects seems to be saner?

disclaimer: I have no exposure to the MS stack, with the exception of playing around with F# which in my opinion is a very well designed language.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#93

Post by soonerjm »

robconery wrote: post #82
Devilboy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I don't agree at all. It's trivial to connect your .net applications to any database you want. If SQL Server is $7000 too expensive it's a mistake to assume you'll be better off dumping the entire .net framework just because .net + SQL Server is more popular than .net + (arbitrary DB) I agree about using the rest of the MS stack with .net but the DB component specifically is highly modular. Let's say you want to g…

Drivers dude. The drivers are SUCK for using MySQL and PostGreSQL. Couch is fine and so is Mongo but the drivers aren't baked (I worked on one for Mongo - built the initial LINQ provider). Run MySQL on Windows and see how slow it is. The driver story is horrific.

I can vouch for the Postgres part of that. We use .NET against PostgreSQL at work (a not especially database-intensive app, fortunately) and wound up using the ODBC drivers. We experimented with Npgsql, but ran into some flakiness that scared us away. There's really not a tremendous amount of documentation around using .NET with Postgres, either, which is unfortunate.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#94

Post by mark_l_watson »

Nice article! I really enjoy hearing about other people's experiences.

I have nothing per se against Microsoft's hosting except for the expense. I believe that it is much more expensive than AppEngine or AWS. Question: the lock-in factor is likely not that big of an issue since apps could be run on Mono and a leased server, right?

Really, software, writing and deploying web apps is a business and there are two large costs involved: labor costs for writing and maintaining software, and hardware+admin costs for deployment. The question is what is least expensive and fastest to deployment. For me, that is Ruby on Rails for the front end, and as needed, back end processing in Java, or Clojure, or Common Lisp - whatever makes sense for a project.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#95

Post by hello_moto »

Artemidoros wrote: post #92
jawngee wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A combination of a lot of things. For starters, the thing is architected poorly, so that does play a big factor in it. I know, I know, it's always the new guy inheriting an existing system that lays to claim that the inherited thing is a piece of garbage, but in this case it is undeniably true. And I can tell you, as someone who has been doing .NET consulting for the last 8+ years, it's not uncommon for MS based solu…

You see, MS is chock full of shitty architecture. And MS devs learn from MS. Do you have an idea why this is the case? Or the other way around why the architecture of OSS projects seems to be saner? disclaimer: I have no exposure to the MS stack, with the exception of playing around with F# which in my opinion is a very well designed language.

Just a wild guess. Microsoft has always trying to dumb down its offering for regular people (i.e.: non-developers). Nothing bad with that, just like Cloud offerings trying to eliminate Sys/Net-Admin. Examples of such (MS) technologies were: Access, ASP.NET, VB. The dream of Microsoft was to cut developers out so that the Biz-guy can whip up a small utility software quickly or to generate various reports quickly.

At some point, MS probably realized that either these tools are not enough or their customers are asking for more because businesses are getting more complex and agility is required.

MS, known as the company that is great in terms of partnering and pleasing everybody except developers, decided to re-brand its offering to be more developer friendly. But at the same time, still serving the non-developers community as well (which seems to be dying slowly because well... if you don't like computers, you will not like it at all, period. You will hire someone to do the "dirty" job for you).

It'll take a while to transform the old MS to the new MS. If they ever made it.

Meanwhile, (some) OSS projects didn't have ambitious goals. They solve the authors's problems. During the inception of the project, they didn't care about the non-developer audiences. They care about themselves: developers.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#96

Post by Artemidoros »

hello_moto wrote: post #95
Artemidoros wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see, MS is chock full of shitty architecture. And MS devs learn from MS. Do you have an idea why this is the case? Or the other way around why the architecture of OSS projects seems to be saner? disclaimer: I have no exposure to the MS stack, with the exception of playing around with F# which in my opinion is a very well designed language.

Just a wild guess. Microsoft has always trying to dumb down its offering for regular people (i.e.: non-developers). Nothing bad with that, just like Cloud offerings trying to eliminate Sys/Net-Admin. Examples of such (MS) technologies were: Access, ASP.NET, VB. The dream of Microsoft was to cut developers out so that the Biz-guy can whip up a small utility software quickly or to generate various reports quickly. At s…

Hard to imagine anybody treating developers worse than Apple :-)

I only catch glimpses of the MS world when I have to use common libraries originally developed by our Windows experts, whose design decisions often leave me puzzled. I am curious about what you think about the idea, that OSS culture incentivized creating architectures conforming to fashion trends, while MS culture incentivized to finish feature X until Y - no matter what it takes (just do it Scotty).

e.g. in the OSS world beginning of 2000 J2EE spawned heavily over-engineered solutions, which were displaced by the convention over configuration trend exploding (mostly due to Rails) around 2006. And now the TDD/BDD crowd are fighting it out with the Architecture & Patterns gang with the DDD and DSL tribes assimilating the surviving concepts...

A member of a currently hip fashion trend will have a better staying power in a nasty flamewar caused by a random design decision about the color of a bike shed in an OSS project than a lone warrior. So you start having design styles competing for followers.

Meanwhile in the MS world (wild guess following) heavily funded 'central planning solutions' (from frameworks to design styles taught for certification purposes) offered by MS stymied competition of alternative approaches. A focus on - if I understood your correctly - usually very risk adverse business needs, while keeping the actual code of produced solutions hidden from outsiders additionally put developers under pressure to avoid experiments.

Would it be reasonable to say that we have an evolutionary system of small actors competing for developers interests (OSS) fueled by vs. a central planning approach of a major corporation backed by a huge war chest?

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#97

Post by troygoode »

jasonkester wrote: post #90
robconery wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out). Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people. I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/…

Yikes. Why would you pay retail for that stuff? Small Business Server gives you all the backend stuff for more like $1000 per server. BizSpark/EmpowerISV/WhateverTheyCallItNextYear gives you all the dev tools and OS stuff essentially for free. I can't imagine that anybody has EVER actually paid $7k per processor for a SQL Server license. We've been running it on our servers for years, properly licensed, and never eve…

BizSpark has an expiration date, as covered by a comment on Rob's blog:

http://blog.wekeroad.com/2010/05/19/no-sql-in-the-wild#comme...

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#98

Post by troygoode »

kenjackson wrote: post #53
SamAtt wrote: post #3

As 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…

I'm not a web dev per se, but I never heard of Rob Conery until now. I now ScottGu, Anders, Cutler, Brumme, Dussud, Crowley, Russinovich, Spiro, even Luca, but never Rob. Not to say he's not a big name, but to say he's the most high profile MS employee beside ScottGu seems absurd. Even in the dev tools space I think you have to give that to Anders.

Rob is primarily well known by those interested in Asp.net MVC - which, given its roots as a RoR knock-off (I say that with love), tends to mean MS web devs with an interest in OSS will have heard of him. He is also well known from his SubSonic project - an OSS ActiveRecordish ORM.

From your list of Technical Fellows it sounds like you're probably not a web dev, so you wouldn't have run into his stuff. An MS web dev these days would tend to list names like ScottGu, Haack, Hanselman, Conery, Walther, le Roy, Wilson, Verissimo, Lipton.

In other news, Anders is totally the cat's pajamas.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#99

Post by troygoode »

robconery wrote: post #83
pbz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the cost of rewriting that small? In my view it would only make sense if the cost of rewriting the app is insignificant. If you can do it in a week or two, sure... any more than that and I would start to question if it's worth it. I mean, you gotta make sure it brings in money first, right? :-)

Overall about 2 weeks total. I took my time and wrote it first in Sinatra, then scrapped and went to Rails - 2 weeks :)

I'd like to hear more about why you switched from Sinatra to Rails. I'm primarily an Asp.net MVC dev who plays with Python/Ruby on the side, but Sinatra really interests me.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#100

Post by troygoode »

redstripe wrote: post #25
pbz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...

This article is pretty short on costing details. Silverlight encoding aside (because that's competely unrelated to asp.net mvc deployment) you can deploy web sites really cheap on the microsoft stack. Windows Web Server: $400 SQL Server Express: Free (Databases have a 4 GB maximum size) I can't image how it would cost them 5 figures to use asp.net mvc. I find the productivity of the MS development stack to be well wo…

Actually, with 2008 R2 the SQL Express limited has been raised to 10GB.
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