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

aaronstannard.com

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

#21

Post by henrikschroder »

megablast wrote: post #17
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.

Your hate is completely misguided, the feature you are complaining about is Web Forms.

.Net is a set of class libraries and a virtual machine, your rant would carry a bit more weight if you at least got the basic terminology right.

(Although it has to be said that even Microsoft can't get it straight all the time either)

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

#22

Post by henrikschroder »

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…

There are addons to make Visual Studio editing just like vim. Or Emacs if you prefer that.

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

#23

Post by henrikschroder »

VengefulCynic wrote: post #5

As someone who has done both Enterprise .NET and startup work, I have to say that the reason we didn't use .NET is much the same as the reason you don't rent a 2-ton backhoe to dig up a flower bed: cost and overkill. Yes, the backhoe might dig the flower bed faster, but it costs $5,000.00 to rent, there's a one-week minimum rental, and its treads tear up your yard to get to the flower bed. On the other hand the shove…

The only thing you really need to pay for is the actual Windows 2000-whatever servers with IIS, everything else you can get for free. Visual Studio Express Edition is free, the .Net framework is free, and you can integrate with all sorts of popular open source products such as MySQL, Postgres, memcached, Cassandra, etc.

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

#24

Post by Daishiman »

henrikschroder wrote: post #21
megablast wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your hate is completely misguided, the feature you are complaining about is Web Forms. .Net is a set of class libraries and a virtual machine, your rant would carry a bit more weight if you at least got the basic terminology right. (Although it has to be said that even Microsoft can't get it straight all the time either)

No, he's completely right. Regardless of what the framework may or may not allow, the fact of the matter is that most .NET web applications are using the full ASP.NET stack, which means that it's the place where most of the mindshare is, so for all practical purposes it would be more difficult to find people who aren't using it, and if you aren't using it then you're probably using another technology stack.

For that matter, when using just the base .NET framework for web development, I fail to see any advantage over Python or Rails beyond familiarity, and many disadvantages.

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

#25

Post by henrikschroder »

alttab wrote: post #12

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 )…

In my experience, .NET, VB, Visual Studio (all while great tools) require you to do things one way, their way.

That is simply not true. However, I agree that breaking out of the MS mold requires more effort than it does for other technologies, and if you couple that with the fact that the overwhelming majority of .Net developers available are unable to do so, then you get a major reason not to do a startup using .Net technologies, it's simply extremely hard to recruit the right people.

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

#26

Post by Zak »

henrikschroder wrote: post #22
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…

There are addons to make Visual Studio editing just like vim. Or Emacs if you prefer that.

Most people don't use Emacs just for the editing, and a big part of the point of Vim is that it's a simple tool that does one thing and does it well. Almost any serious development environment (editor and development tools, integrated or not) can be made to do most of the stuff that any other can do. Tool preferences are about how the tool fits with the user's personal style, not specific checkboxes on a feature list, even if it's something like "customizability".

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

#27

Post by ericb »

henrikschroder wrote: post #23
VengefulCynic wrote: post #5

As someone who has done both Enterprise .NET and startup work, I have to say that the reason we didn't use .NET is much the same as the reason you don't rent a 2-ton backhoe to dig up a flower bed: cost and overkill. Yes, the backhoe might dig the flower bed faster, but it costs $5,000.00 to rent, there's a one-week minimum rental, and its treads tear up your yard to get to the flower bed. On the other hand the shove…

The only thing you really need to pay for is the actual Windows 2000-whatever servers with IIS, everything else you can get for free. Visual Studio Express Edition is free, the .Net framework is free, and you can integrate with all sorts of popular open source products such as MySQL, Postgres, memcached, Cassandra, etc.

The first crack-hit is also usually free. Same business model.

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

#28

Post by Daishiman »

henrikschroder wrote: post #22
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…

There are addons to make Visual Studio editing just like vim. Or Emacs if you prefer that.

And the Vim plugin is an absolute failure, and the development enviroment takes 30 seconds to startup, 30 seconds to connect to a TFS server over the Internet, and stutter every 20 seconds whenever you want to switch windows. oh, and let's not forget the 15 second build time for debugging.

Vim is here, now, the very second you need it, over an SSH connection, and far, far more customizable and with more useful plugins. The advantages of Visual Studio (namely, integration of features and great code completion) are lost when a framework fits in your head and you've automated most of your tools.

I say this as a person that spends 50% of his time on VS, the rest on Vim.

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

#29

Post by kenjackson »

alttab wrote: post #12

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 )…

The CLI is as much a technology as Ruby is, with respective canonical implementations.

Now Visual Studio is a tool. But not fundamentally different than a tool like Vi or Emacs. And csc is not fundamentally different than gcc.

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

#30

Post by DrJokepu »

alttab wrote: post #12

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 )…

> 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.

To be honest, that's not my experience. I've found that .NET gives you a lot of freedom, however things can be indeed easier if you do things the "recommended" way, but there's also an "if that's what you want, you can do it if you think you know what you're doing" mentality as well in the design of the framework. I mean, C# even has pointers which is quite uncommon in similar high-level languages, albeit well hidden so you only get to use them if you really want to.

Contrast that to Python's famous "there's only one way to do it" philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I think Python is really great stuff but I think it's unfair to say that .NET (as opposed to Ruby or Python) forces you to do things "one way, their way". If you want to do web development, you can choose between MVC and the (kind of) continuations of WebForms; imperative or functional, direct SQL, LINQ or the Entity Framework etc. - there are a lot of choices to be made.

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