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Building a Web-App the Microsoft Way

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Re: Building a Web-App the Microsoft Way

#2
Microsoft has done some good work in the last couple of years at making their tools suck a lot less for web development. ASP.NET MVC, a newer framework with a Rails-like approach, is also coming along nicely.

Honestly, the main reason most ASP.NET websites suck so badly is that the Microsoft tries to make its tools accessible to developers who don't want to bother to learn and use web standards, and when used by the standards-oblivious, the resulting web apps are generally very poor in the standards compliance department.

Re: Building a Web-App the Microsoft Way

#3
The Microsoft platform has worked very well for Loopt as well, though I can't claim we're good enough to have had only two bugs since launch :)

As for cost, we spend less on software licensing per year than we do for our least compensated employee by a substantial margin. We've also had no issues with security thus far (fingers crossed).

Re: Building a Web-App the Microsoft Way

#5
"Possibly the main argument against using Microsoft from the open source point of view has been the issue of expense. However the .NET Framework can be downloaded for free plus they also provide ‘Express’ versions of Visual Studio and their SQL Server database software which we used and are also free."

This only addresses the development versions of their software. What about license costs for the production instances of Windows Server and SQL Server? That's where costs really start getting prohibitive on an MS stack. For a startup at least.

Re: Building a Web-App the Microsoft Way

#6
post #3

The Microsoft platform has worked very well for Loopt as well, though I can't claim we're good enough to have had only two bugs since launch :) As for cost, we spend less on software licensing per year than we do for our least compensated employee by a substantial margin. We've also had no issues with security thus far (fingers crossed).

Just out of curiosity, why did you choose the MS platform? I mean what advantages did it provide over the open platforms that would actually be helpful for skilled programmers?

Re: Building a Web-App the Microsoft Way

#7
post #3

The Microsoft platform has worked very well for Loopt as well, though I can't claim we're good enough to have had only two bugs since launch :) As for cost, we spend less on software licensing per year than we do for our least compensated employee by a substantial margin. We've also had no issues with security thus far (fingers crossed).

Just out of curiosity, why did you choose the MS platform? I mean what advantages did it provide over the open platforms that would actually be helpful for skilled programmers?

I have no idea why (or even how, now that I think of it) you got downmodded (I put you back up)... I think in this day and age if a platform is going to be closed and non-free, it should have to justify those disadvantages. Where does it make up the slack?

Re: Building a Web-App the Microsoft Way

#8

"Possibly the main argument against using Microsoft from the open source point of view has been the issue of expense. However the .NET Framework can be downloaded for free plus they also provide ‘Express’ versions of Visual Studio and their SQL Server database software which we used and are also free." This only addresses the development versions of their software. What about license costs for the production instance…

Having about 3 meetings created per day on average since launch would not qualify this app as a success by any count. For this amount of usage, a shared account on a cheap web hosting service would probably do. Most probably any 32 bit item in my interesting computer collection (if I had any Windows boxes, that is) would be able to carry that load without breaking a sweat.

However, one could not be able to base a startup on this structure, much less a successful one.

Re: Building a Web-App the Microsoft Way

#9
ASP.NET and C# has worked well for Workpost so far. We were able to get version 1.0 online quickly and any issues we've had lately are not related to the platform.

Scaling will be a difficult (but welcome) problem though SQL Server does not have to cost quite as much as most people think it does.

Microsoft could, however, offer more incentives and assistance to startups who choose to use their platform. They've made a lot of progress in the last few years toward being more developer-friendly but they need to go even further.

Finding talented ASP.NET / C# developers willing to work on startups can also also a challenge.

Re: Building a Web-App the Microsoft Way

#10

"Possibly the main argument against using Microsoft from the open source point of view has been the issue of expense. However the .NET Framework can be downloaded for free plus they also provide ‘Express’ versions of Visual Studio and their SQL Server database software which we used and are also free." This only addresses the development versions of their software. What about license costs for the production instance…

Let's go on the assumption .NET MVC/mssql is comparable to rails/mysql or django/postgres in quality, performance, time to build, etc.

How could anyone consider using the option that is not free and open source?

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