.NET Culture Shock: Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups

Because like most enterprise software the people using it aren't the people buying it. When they have a choice they go elsewhere.

The author asserts that Visual Studio is a much better development platform than everything else. I use IntelliJ, emacs, Unix cli, Perl, etc What am I missing? I'm sure Visual Studio is good but even if it's better, how much better is it?

I think a big difference is how we define small, e.g. Wikipedia tells me:

In the United States the Small Business Administration establishes small business size standards on an industry-by-industry basis, but generally specifies a small business as having fewer than 500 employees for manufacturing businesses and less than $7 million in annual receipts for most nonmanufacturing businesses.

When Microsoft makes something for small business, that's what they are imagining. For a boot strapped hacker working on a website, 500 people and $7 million is a long long way away...

To be brutally honest about .Net, and I use it and like it myself, the reason there's no startup market in it is because until MVC there was no point developing in it.

ASP.Net controls, postbacks for everything, view state, a general hiding of the actual power of ajax and an obsession with using tables made .Net a terrible web development environment if you had any clue what you were doing. The html it spat out was a bloated horrible mess, web services were anything but unless you really slogged your way through some pain, ashx pages and the directory structure just felt plain wrong.

That said I'd almost, almost, switched to using python/django and then I had a look at MVC and it did everything I needed. Full control over html, nice code separation, a nifty ORM for taking away the pain of basic crud. An alright templating system easily extensible using extension methods. And 3.5 brought some tricks using LINQ and anonymous methods.

I still know I need to learn a few more languages, but MVC has allowed me to copy everything I felt was the 'right' way of developing webs apps from rails/django without having to actually learn a new language and dev environment.

If you weren't worried about performance and didn't want to learn how to actually program, the old ASP.Net was ok for very quickly throwing out web apps for the 10 people in HR. Much more than that required an in depth of knowledge way beyond most .Net programmers, with most of those people being multi-lingual anyway and tending to opt for the cleaner code the alternatives offered.

I don't feel that's the case anymore, but it's way behind in adoption at the moment.

You still hit the occasional WTF in MVC where if feels as if someone wrote a part of the system without reading the memo about flexibility (the validation solution in MVC, for example, is terrible, although not finished and LINQ to entities can be frustrating).

tl;dr;? No startups because until recently good web development in .Net was actually really hard. MVC's changed that.

I've been to 2 dotNet local conferences already ... the presentations are centered around Office / Sharepoint integration, plus company-sponsored propaganda (also targeted at the enterprise) that made me wanna` puke out of boredom. Even the presentation on Silverlight was focused on data-binding and how easy it is to build boring forms out of clicky-clicky actions.

This is especially telling considering I did work for "the enterprise" and I'm still doing it as a consultant.

Of course, personally I don't need more propaganda and advocacy.

Just last month I created an app for managing the webcams of a client. I used Red5 (the open-source Flash streaming server), in combination with Apache / Django + a MySql database. Besides my billing per hour, the extra cost to the client for the licensing of this infrastructure was $0.

And for my app, while I would love some of the stuff in .NET, I don't want to pay extra for those Windows servers, even if they provided extra-value over Linux (which they don't).

Putting your business hat on ... as a startup or as a pragmatic consultant, paying extra for Windows servers is not worth the price, unless the cost of switching from .NET is big (and really ... which other technology has such a big cost of switching?).

Sure ... it's easier to blame the lack of advocacy. The Perl community is also doing it (and I would rather go with Perl apps hosted on Linux servers than suffer the Windows licensing hell).