11–20 of 25 posts
Dont get caught up too much in worrying what other people are using. You initial technology stack will not make or break your company as you can always iterate to another technology stack at a later date if you wish.
I think there are many things that you need to consider when deciding on a technology. One is preexisting skill, if you are already a .Net C# person then go with what you know. That being said rails is free and can be deployed on *nix which is also free. Dont get caught up too much in worrying what other people are using. You initial technology stack will not make or break your company as you can always iterate to an…
Unless you are somehow already tied to Microsoft I don't see how it is at all sane to go with .NET for a greenfield project. In .NET you are paying Microsoft for whatever they deem suitable to bequeath down to its licensees. There's been a lot of hand-wringing in the community over slow uptake on new web tech, and general problems that go unresolved because it's not an open source model. On the plus side, you get a n…
"Lack of success on the web"? Besides the obvious "Stack Overflow, Myspace, Plenty of Fish" answer, observe that many --- perhaps over 50% --- of the largest company sites on the web are .NET, as are retail banking sites, trading firms, brokerages, etc. And, obviously, something like half of all enterprise web apps are .NET. If that all seems like it trends corporate for you, well, that's obviously going to happen wh…
Why not fire off a quick prototype app on Rails or Sinatra and see how it feels? Ruby/Rails is $0, and committing your team's time to a decision made without any context is not. There's no need to make that decision in a vacuum.
Why yes, actually -- the startup I am working on uses .NET as I (the technical co-founder) am traditionally a .NET developer. http://salesathand.com
> We have heard that Ruby on Rails is far quicker then trying to develop a web application
This is true if you are familiar with RoR. If you're not familiar with the platform then it's not going to be true.
>but wondered if that is really true or if there are examples of companies that have just built on a .NET framework from the beginning?
Yes, I am quite productive on .NET and that's why I stay. I'd love to migrate to an OSS platform -- Python would be amazing -- but I'm just not productive in that environment (yet) and the one thing a startup can't loose is productivity!
I use tons of OSS tools, though, that make things go faster and smoother. The biggest of which is NHibernate. Also, avoid ASP.NET and use MVC if you can.
Unless you are somehow already tied to Microsoft I don't see how it is at all sane to go with .NET for a greenfield project. In .NET you are paying Microsoft for whatever they deem suitable to bequeath down to its licensees. There's been a lot of hand-wringing in the community over slow uptake on new web tech, and general problems that go unresolved because it's not an open source model. On the plus side, you get a n…
"Lack of success on the web"? Besides the obvious "Stack Overflow, Myspace, Plenty of Fish" answer, observe that many --- perhaps over 50% --- of the largest company sites on the web are .NET, as are retail banking sites, trading firms, brokerages, etc. And, obviously, something like half of all enterprise web apps are .NET. If that all seems like it trends corporate for you, well, that's obviously going to happen wh…
That all said, if you don't know .NET or Rails or Ruby or whatever - you're probably better off selecting something that won't cost you money right from the start...
There are programs that MS has to temporarily offset these costs, as others mentioned. Check out www.microsoft.com/bizspark/
(You/others may also be interested in http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/ and https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx)
-Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/
-Agile Zen: http://agilezen.com/
The framework you use to develop doesn't matter. If you like .NET go with it, if you like RoR go with it. For costs, you can take a look at the BizSpark program from MS, you can get all MS products you need for $100 for 3 years, then you pay for it.