.NET Culture Shock: Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by senthilnayagam » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 10:42 PM UTC

there is a whole generation of developers who came out of college with the notion of Microsoft being evil.

also the trends setup by VC's like YCombinator, good college/university like MIT is, you can make cool products with open source ecosystem.

not sure how much you would remember, about 15 years ago it used to cost a large chunk of money to build scalable apps as 70% of the investment was sunk into datacenter acquisition.

another cool aspect is lot of new popular apps like posterous, started out as a single usable idea were implemented over a weekend and polished with multiple iterations.

licensing cost is still a big negative for those have discovered the power of open source technology, also the community is lot more evolved in sharing the expertise.

application frameworks like Ruby on Rails played a big role in getting the best practices like MVC Architecture, source code management, TDD/BDD, code generation, reuse in open source web frameworks

cloud computing infrastructure like amazon web services and linode VPS maks people experiment new projects at lot less cost.

Personally I have problems with many .Net developers who are "fish out of water", when it comes to living without the Visual Studio IDE. standards and features like XHTML, AJAX(prototype, jquery others ) came lot later in .Net programmers toolset until Internet Explorer was the leading in developer mindshare.

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

#12

Post by alttab » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 10:47 PM UTC

What sounds more attractive to a Hacker type looking to work on a startup?

"Come be an effective software engineer in today's new start up and use .NET to change the internet!"

or

"Laid back atmosphere, free pizza, Ruby and text mate. Let's get at it."

MS is a tool set - not technology. Hackers are very opinionated and want to do things their own way. In my experience, .NET, VB, Visual Studio (all while great tools) require you to do things one way, their way. That just doesn't sit well.

Then of course there is cost, stigma, lock-in, etc. Start ups are the anti-Microsoft, using it as a platform to build their technology, from a very fundamental level, is dissonant.

It certainly is culture shock, and its not going to get any better for Microsoft in these markets. But they don't care, their business isn't designed for it. Microsoft doesn't do consumer products well. If you think about it, the only reason DOS got in front of everyone is because they were able to sell it to IBM.

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

#13

Post by barrkel » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 10:51 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #8

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…

This is false because it relies on an incorrect assumption: that if you were using .NET to do web development prior to MVC, you had to use ASP.NET.

When I was writing .NET web applications, the sum total of ASP.NET integration was implementing IHttpHandler and friends - not much more than access to the request and response streams. You can build your own lightweight framework, which, being lightweight, isn't a big deal.

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

#14

Post by Encosia » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 10:54 PM UTC

ihumanable wrote: post #9

Why nit just know your place? Microsoft is fine (or at least was fine with) targeting massive enterprises and signing lucrative contracts with lots and lots of zeroes and lock-in. Why not adopt some unix philosophy into the ms ecosystem and just do one thing well. I was willing to sympathesize with this article until the visual studio destroying everyone else feature set wise comment. Despite what you may think you a…

Everyone's going to have different favorite editors; nothing wrong with that. However, the free version of Visual Studio 2010 has both the features you cited.

(and for what it's worth, I wasn't the one who downvoted your comment)

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

#15

Post by bad_user » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 10:55 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #13

mattmanser wrote: post #8

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…

This is false because it relies on an incorrect assumption: that if you were using .NET to do web development prior to MVC, you had to use ASP.NET. When I was writing .NET web applications, the sum total of ASP.NET integration was implementing IHttpHandler and friends - not much more than access to the request and response streams. You can build your own lightweight framework, which, being lightweight, isn't a big de…

There was also MonoRail, an MVC framework inspired by Rails ... http://www.castleproject.org/MonoRail/

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

#16

Post by Zak » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 10:57 PM UTC

Visual Studio destroys [other environments] in any feature set-to-feature set comparison.

sounds an awful lot like

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame

Even for the nerdy, a long feature list is not what actually makes people want to use a tool. In the case of Emacs, it's the customizability. With Vim, it's the simplicity, speed and focus on its purpose. Other environments have their own advantages that don't fit neatly in to a feature list.

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

#17

Post by megablast » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 10:59 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #8

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…

This is why I hate .Net, it hides everything, changes the normal pages work. I guess it does this to make it easier for people who don't understand what is going on, but it just frustrates me. I understand the way POST and servers work, I don't feel the need to have to unlearn that and learn Microsoft twisted version of the web. And the horrible code and javascript it puts on a page is just ugly.

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

#18

Post by TeHCrAzY » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 11:01 PM UTC

naz wrote: post #2

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

My real world experience with this is entirely different. Most .net devs are doing what they do because they have the best job prospects in that slice of the industry, especially in light of the overall skillset for the average .net coder is 90% .net, and 10% in the other languages learnt during thier degree.

I personally enjoy working in .net; the entire development process is very smooth and intergrated.

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

#19

Post by TeHCrAzY » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 11:03 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #16

Visual Studio destroys [other environments] in any feature set-to-feature set comparison. sounds an awful lot like No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame Even for the nerdy, a long feature list is not what actually makes people want to use a tool. In the case of Emacs, it's the customizability. With Vim, it's the simplicity, speed and focus on its purpose. Other environments have their own advantages that don't f…

Fyi, visual studio is extremly customisable. See: resharper.

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

#20

Post by henrikschroder » Mon, Jul 05, 2010, 11:09 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #13

mattmanser wrote: post #8

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…

This is false because it relies on an incorrect assumption: that if you were using .NET to do web development prior to MVC, you had to use ASP.NET. When I was writing .NET web applications, the sum total of ASP.NET integration was implementing IHttpHandler and friends - not much more than access to the request and response streams. You can build your own lightweight framework, which, being lightweight, isn't a big de…

+1 for this. We've been working in C#/ASP.Net for 7 years now, and we always stayed as far away from ASP.Net controls and Web Forms as possible. Some things we liked such as master pages and making a class hierarchy for the pages to inherit, so we used that.

For the past two years we've been using our own light-weight MVC framework.

C# and IIS are very versatile technologies, you don't have to buy into the entire Microsoft tool chain to use it, you can use whatever parts you want.