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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

#41

Post by borisk »

Daishiman wrote: post #31
henrikschroder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My time doing deployments and dealing with Windows Server issues is not free. Neither is the time lost using RDP instead of SSH, dealing with licenses, requiring much more HD space than the alternatives, and lacking real scripting solutions. I have yet to hear anyone using LINQ on anything that's not SQL Server, and considering the NIH syndrome in Microsoft, I wouldn't recommend it.

Haha, LINQ is the best part of the framework. It was in part designed by Erik Meijer and Don Syme(who are big names in functional languages community). LINQ to objects and to XML are widely used. There are hundreds of non-Microsoft LINQ providers, like LINQ to Amazon. Generally LINQ is about higher order functions, monad pattern, map-reduce. Have you tried it? It's fantastic.

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

#42

Post by epochwolf »

S_A_P wrote: post #38

You dont have to use webforms, and using ASP.NET can be quite pleasurable if you dont use the "asp" controls and postbacks. HOWEVER, the second that Sharepoint enters the equation, I turn, run, and dont look back. What a horrendous kludgefest that is...

How do you use ASP.Net without webforms? I ask because I've only had a one course introduction to ASP.Net Webforms in school.

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

#43

Post by epochwolf »

henrikschroder wrote: post #33
Daishiman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My time doing deployments and dealing with Windows Server issues is not free. Neither is the time lost using RDP instead of SSH, dealing with licenses, requiring much more HD space than the alternatives, and lacking real scripting solutions. I have yet to hear anyone using LINQ on anything that's not SQL Server, and considering the NIH syndrome in Microsoft, I wouldn't recommend it.

My time doing deployments and dealing with Windows Server issues is not free. We don't have any issues with our Windows servers, but I guess the number of issues you run into is proportional to your experience. We would have a lot more problems dealing with Linux servers. YMMV. Neither is the time lost using RDP instead of SSH Practice makes perfect... dealing with licenses What? You buy it, you install it, done? req…

Have you even looked at how much bandwidth RDP uses compared to SSH? I can have 7 or 8 ssh connections open and monitoring files where windows can't get one remote connection working properly.

As for installing, Debian/Ubuntu can't get any easier.

    apt-get install
And if you need the very latest nginx?

    wget 
    tar -xzvf 
    cd 
    ./configure
    make
    make install
Even better, you can script this with bash with little effort. (Complex scripting can be more difficult but that's not what we are doing here)

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

#44

Post by squidsoup »

epochwolf wrote: post #42
S_A_P wrote: post #38

You dont have to use webforms, and using ASP.NET can be quite pleasurable if you dont use the "asp" controls and postbacks. HOWEVER, the second that Sharepoint enters the equation, I turn, run, and dont look back. What a horrendous kludgefest that is...

How do you use ASP.Net without webforms? I ask because I've only had a one course introduction to ASP.Net Webforms in school.

http://www.asp.net/mvc

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

#45

Post by nl »

melling wrote: post #4

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?

Do you like IntelliJ?

If so, Visual Studio isn't as good, but is kind of comparable. It's better than Netbeans. Personally I prefer Eclipse, but I can see that others may prefer VS.

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

#46

Post by borisk »

.NET FW is 1st class at tehnical level, but Microsoft platform around it is no good for a startup. You want to write mobile apps - Windows Mobile/Phone is a joke. Want cloud computing - Windows Azure is $100 per month for the simplest web site, no matter how many requests served. There is no also no way to play with the real thing for free.

Another problem is most MS internal developers still live in the 80s. You can hear "Real man write C++" all the time. Just browse the source code, written by MS employes, on Codeplex. They write C++ in C#. The APIs are out of this world - 25 or 50 lines of code to use a simple feature is no problem.

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

#47

Post by jonny_noog »

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…

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.

I had almost convinced one of my ASP.Net developer friends who was well fed up with web forms to jump ship to Ruby and Rails with me when .Net MVC came out. After that, there wasn't a whole lot of a compelling reasons for him to start on a whole new language and framework anymore. If only they'd waited a few more weeks! Curse you Microsoft!

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

#48

Post by nl »

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.

If you are only using VS Express you are working with one hand tied behind your back.

If you go for .NET development, at least do it properly. The up front costs really are an issue, though.

Also, while it is true you can integrate with all sorts of popular open source products such as MySQL, Postgres, memcached, Cassandra, etc you'd have to ask yourself why not just use the environments they are supposed to work with?

Using them with .NET is like doing Windows thick client development in Java - possible, but a horrible experience. It's always the details that kill you. I don't know if you ever had to do JavaCOM integration, but doing that for a while taught me that all platforms have their specialities, and it's a lot easier if you don't fight them.

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

#49

Post by portlandFan12 »

benologist wrote: post #7

I'm using .NET ... most of the tools are provided free and the full versions provided free by BizSpark, which I joined for free and now have a 3 year MSDN subscription that entitles me to a load of stuff. It was only very recently that I stopped running http://www.swfstats.com/ on SQL Server Express. I think the real difference is it's just not front page news you're doing x with .NET. The web just likes to amplify a…

BizSpark isn't really free, is it? You have to pay full price once you fail to meet the eligibility requirements.

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

#50

Post by swilliams »

henrikschroder wrote: post #20
barrkel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mic…

This is true, but it also reinforces the statement that WebForms suck. It was so broken, that you had to write your own framework to deal with it.
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