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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

#61

Post by iskander »

snprbob86 wrote: post #59
iskander wrote: post #57

I only programmed .NET in the days of 2.0, so my problems with it come from an older less capable framework. Nonetheless, when your language of choice requires you to distinguish between: - IComparable - IComparable(Of T) - IEquatable(Of T) - IStructuralEquatable - IStructuralComparable - IEqualityComparer - IEqualityComparer(Of T) - IComparer(Of T) - overriding Object.Equals - overriding operators , =, =, ...it's ti…

Saying that you need to understand and differentiate between all of these is disingenuous. - The "Structural*" types are new in .Net 4.0, you never had to understand them before and you probably don't need to even know they exist now. - Many of these listed are just generic vs non-generic. The generic ones subclass the non-generic ones, so contraviance eliminates the need to really understand the distinction upfront.…

>- The "Structural*" types are new in .Net 4.0, you never had to understand them before and you probably don't need to even know they exist now.

You're right, I scooped those off MSDN and never use them myself. All the others, however, have made numerous appearances in my code. I think that the preponderance of comparisons is a language smell-- it's not close to my only problem with .NET development but I think it captures the essential headache-inducing inelegance of C#/VB programming. That language-blob has little regularity but much accretion. There are rarely sane defaults nor any overarching design for your mind to latch onto. After time spent with saner languages (Python, Haskell, Ruby, OCaml, etc...) coding in .NET feels terrible.

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

#62

Post by melling »

nl wrote: post #45
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.

IntelliJ is great. They have a free version for people who want to try it.

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/index.html

The same guys make Resharper for Visual Studio. I can't imagine that Visual Studio is better if the Java guys are making a plugin for it. I have heard that for C++, VS is hard to beat, but I haven't done that in a few years.

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

#63

Post by hello_moto »

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…

The main problem with Visual Studio is the "soft" vendor lock-in problem: if I want to use VS.NET with SVN (via AnkhSVN), the experience sucks compare to Eclipse and Subclipse.

Basically, VS.NET wants you to use other MS products as well such as MTM, TFS, to be very very productive in MS environment. Using VS.NET, SVN, TeamCity and a mixed bags of other software will not give a smooth experience compare to using all-MS or go with Open Source.

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

#64

Post by snprbob86 »

iskander wrote: post #61
snprbob86 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that you need to understand and differentiate between all of these is disingenuous. - The "Structural*" types are new in .Net 4.0, you never had to understand them before and you probably don't need to even know they exist now. - Many of these listed are just generic vs non-generic. The generic ones subclass the non-generic ones, so contraviance eliminates the need to really understand the distinction upfront.…

>- The "Structural*" types are new in .Net 4.0, you never had to understand them before and you probably don't need to even know they exist now. You're right, I scooped those off MSDN and never use them myself. All the others, however, have made numerous appearances in my code. I think that the preponderance of comparisons is a language smell-- it's not close to my only problem with .NET development but I think it ca…

Java also has Comparer and Comparator in both generic and non-generic flavors. Java lacks Equatable, which is a problem. Haskell, for example, has both Eq and Ord. It is frequently possible and convenient to be able to implement Eq in terms of Ord and part of Ord in terms of Eq, but these are orthogonal concepts.

As someone who has done A LOT of professional C# development: I've found that with only a few exceptions, the .NET base class libraries are very well designed with entirely reasonable defaults. I use Python primarily now and, in general, the core .NET libraries seem to be better designed than most of the older Python libraries (many of which are getting properly cleaned up in Python 3).

Every environment has its cruft.

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

#65

Post by megablast »

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)

Thanks, I will try to clarify my rants better in the future :)

I have only looked at web forms, I guess. Never actually formally been taught anything to do with .net. That was enough to turn me off.

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

#66

Post by etree »

I did some .NET development in college and after years of Python and PHP development, I finally started working on a Rails project about a month ago, and a couple of weeks ago I had to do some .NET development for a client. Obviously you can do anything in any of these environments, but I really did find .NET to be the most difficult to work in.

My issue is mostly around tools, not any of the languages themselves. In my ubuntu/rails environment i was up and running in 5 minutes with a text editor and a couple of sudo aptitude commands. With .NET i had to spend hours downloading and installing two different versions of the .NET framework, VS 2010, and SQL Server Management Studio. This was to say nothing of any external libraries. Now that i am up and running and my environment is setup its fine i suppose but frankly it took days just to be able to do hello world. With Rails I was there in 5 min, and it scaled with me. It was proportionally just as easy to get hello world going as something more complicated. The base bar to getting moving in .NET by comparison was several days - and if i wasn't being paid to do it, i never would have just for the sake of playing around.

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

#67

Post by henrikschroder »

swilliams wrote: post #50
henrikschroder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

To be fair, ASP.Net was a better technology than JSP, which were the main competitors back then. On top of ASP.Net, Microsoft built Web Forms, which is really bad when it comes to building large, scalable web applications. Unfortunately, Microsoft kinda stopped there, whereas the Java community continued and made Struts and Spring and whatever else they do now.

And that highlights the other problem with using the Microsoft stack: There's no community around popular frameworks, the absolute majority use only what comes out of Redmond, and if nothing comes, then they're just stuck.

In the Java community, there were loads of MVC frameworks, people built it, and the popular ones flourished, and people could move on. In the .Net community, nothing really happened until Microsoft themselves made an MVC framework.

So being on the Microsoft stack is more like a roller-coaster than a smooth progression, and that is a problem, because it's not very startup-friendly.

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

#68

Post by henrikschroder »

melling wrote: post #62
nl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IntelliJ is great. They have a free version for people who want to try it. http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/index.html The same guys make Resharper for Visual Studio. I can't imagine that Visual Studio is better if the Java guys are making a plugin for it. I have heard that for C++, VS is hard to beat, but I haven't done that in a few years.

For VS 2003 I had to use ReSharper to make it bearable. For VS 2005 it made it better. For VS 2008 ReSharper didn't really add anything anymore, and VS 2010 has all the features of ReSharper and more.

VS has evolved quite a lot, and I don't acutely miss Eclipse anymore whenever I'm in VS.

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

#69

Post by andrewbadera »

bad_user wrote: post #10

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 fo…

BizSpark/WebSpark blow away any complaints or concerns, valid or not, of server or hosting costs as almost any valid, new/new-ish software startup should qualify.

On the other side of that, MySQL enterprise licensing is only marginally cheaper than SQL Server, and one might argue lacks features and rich toolsets to work with in the enterprise. And in the end, most web-based startups are really SaaS so yes, you really do need to be thinking in terms of enterprise, and minimizing annual cost of delivery and ownership/subscriber.

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

#70

Post by bad_user »

andrewbadera wrote: post #69
bad_user wrote: post #10

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 fo…

BizSpark/WebSpark blow away any complaints or concerns, valid or not, of server or hosting costs as almost any valid, new/new-ish software startup should qualify. On the other side of that, MySQL enterprise licensing is only marginally cheaper than SQL Server, and one might argue lacks features and rich toolsets to work with in the enterprise. And in the end, most web-based startups are really SaaS so yes, you really…

First, the example I've chosen was on purpose ... like if you enroll in WebSpark, that's useless if you need the IIS Media Services. Also, you can't have more than 4 processors serving your app.

It also doesn't spare your costumer (in the case of consultancy services) to buy licenses.

Second ... not everybody can enroll. The company I'm working for has 12 members ... some of them are field engineers that aren't doing programming (I mentioned we do consulting). WebSpark at least is out of the picture.

Third ... these programs are ticking time-bombs. I've worked on and off on several personal projects for the last 5 years (I'm doing it part time). 3 years is not enough, unless you have a good idea that you're sure it's going to work (and this doesn't happen that often).

> MySQL enterprise licensing is only marginally cheaper than SQL Server

A startup-founder would be too dumb to pay for MySql support.

HINT: you get all the support you need from its community, especially if you attend conferences and buy a round of beer to its core devs ;)

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