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Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

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Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#111
post #47

I find this juxtaposition pretty funny: "I made a list of likely acquirers and then looked at what kind of programming skills they hire for. It was clear they all favor Microsoft. All things being equal it seemed logical to do the same." and "At the end of the day things just have to work and customers don’t give a shit what technology you built your site on." If you're building a startup to "flip" it, isn't your fut…

yeah, what a misleading title.

"nobody cares what language you use." "potential buyers like asp."

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#112
post #14
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't get. ASP.NET scales pretty well as Joel opines. Why do people think .NET is bad just because it feels enterprise-y? More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ

You're right, .NET (even though I despise it) scales as well as anything else. Scalability is much more about design decisions than language/platform choice. However, Joel Spolsky is a tool. Everyone I know and respect thinks he's a tool. He is a prime example of being successful because of being lucky, rather than being good. Do not quote Joel, he can't form a valid argument for a topic without circling back on hims…

At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities Joel's team at Fogcreek developed their own platform:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html

So I would say that he's actually got a pretty interesting perspective on choosing technology platforms for web applications.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#113
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, .NET (even though I despise it) scales as well as anything else. Scalability is much more about design decisions than language/platform choice. However, Joel Spolsky is a tool. Everyone I know and respect thinks he's a tool. He is a prime example of being successful because of being lucky, rather than being good. Do not quote Joel, he can't form a valid argument for a topic without circling back on hims…

At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities Joel's team at Fogcreek developed their own platform: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html So I would say that he's actually got a pretty interesting perspective on choosing technology platforms for web applications.

Actually, that article is one of the most interesting and useful examples to point to when discussing the insanity that is Joel. That solution is just so ridiculous.

His software runs on a compiler that has had 2 months work put into it and worse, it compiles to either VBScript or PHP.

It's probably the most counter-intuitive solution ever implemented to solve the problem of needing a web-based application to run on both Windows and Linux.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#114

I feel that the author just didn't try any other technologies. > I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation I find this hard to believe. Again I think the author knows his way around Microsoft products, and is biased towards it. > Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is. I find this statement self-justifying and false. If a…

.NET documentation is really good. I can't quantify it as being the best but there is so much training material out there.

Examples: Tons of free video tutorials: http://www.asp.net/web-forms http://www.asp.net/mvc http://www.mvcconf.com/

heaps of books http://www.asp.net/community/books http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...

then of course there is the Microsoft Developer Network http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/ff380144

with training courses/hands on labs http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/VS2010TrainingCourse_AspNetM...

plenty of people who can answer your questions on SO (C# and ASP.NET are a couple of the most popular tags) http://stackoverflow.com/tags

and msdn forums http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-au/categories

if you want to pay for training, there's plenty of that too, as .NET is used lots in the enterprise there is training centres and other paid services a plenty: http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/ http://learning.microsoft.com/manager/catalog.aspx?brand=msd...

additionally, they have a certification program with all the training materials and training courses for that http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-v...

I realize that there is probably great documentation for other open source frameworks as well, but I can see that it's likely Microsoft will always have great documentation on the very latest versions of their tools as they pay people to make the documentation, whereas OSS frameworks are more likely to rely on people to write boring documentation in their spare time.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#115
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, .NET (even though I despise it) scales as well as anything else. Scalability is much more about design decisions than language/platform choice. However, Joel Spolsky is a tool. Everyone I know and respect thinks he's a tool. He is a prime example of being successful because of being lucky, rather than being good. Do not quote Joel, he can't form a valid argument for a topic without circling back on hims…

Whether Joel Spolsky is or is not a tool, lucky, good etc is completely irrelevant. He and the rest of the SE/SO team has built a highly scalable solution based on .NET. So in a discussion about scaling on .NET, it absolutely makes sense to listen to his experiences.

Actually, FogBugz is trivial to scale - there is never any more than a few dozen, to hundreds of users for any one project.

And Copilot wasn't even envisaged or created by Joel, but was rather a project created by some interns.

FogCreek doesn't innovate (they have a bug tracker and a remote support application based on VNC). Joel just happened to be one of the first to blog constantly about technology. He doesn't even allow comments on his posts because he doesn't want to have to deal with people contradicting him (not that he doesn't do an excellent job at this himself).

There are so many great developers and businesses out there that you could use as an example to model your business and software on. Use them, not Joel. Let Joel's business and opinions fade away as other smart, innovative companies run rings around his ageing product suite.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what metric does Microsoft stuff perform really well? You're seriously saying you choose Microsoft for performance and stability? And you have a dozen upvotes?

.NET actually isn't that bad as far as performance and stability go. It's about on par with Java. It's much faster than scripting languages, and significantly more stable than Ruby. Administering a Windows stack can sometimes blow, but the languages and virtual machines themselves are relatively solid.

More stable than Ruby? Rails may have started off quite leaky, but to call anything that's been put into production in the past 2 years unstable is just plain FUD.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#117
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether Joel Spolsky is or is not a tool, lucky, good etc is completely irrelevant. He and the rest of the SE/SO team has built a highly scalable solution based on .NET. So in a discussion about scaling on .NET, it absolutely makes sense to listen to his experiences.

Actually, FogBugz is trivial to scale - there is never any more than a few dozen, to hundreds of users for any one project. And Copilot wasn't even envisaged or created by Joel, but was rather a project created by some interns. FogCreek doesn't innovate (they have a bug tracker and a remote support application based on VNC). Joel just happened to be one of the first to blog constantly about technology. He doesn't eve…

SE/SO == "Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow"

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#118

I think ASP.Net is a pretty smart move even if you do have a strong CS background and know a few other platforms. The basic reason is that Microsoft stuff performs really well and you won't have to worry about a lot of problems for a very long time. Chances are one or two webservers will handle your page requests for quite some time before you need to start thinking about it. ASP.Net's sessions also work very well wi…

By what metric does Microsoft stuff perform really well? You're seriously saying you choose Microsoft for performance and stability? And you have a dozen upvotes?

Seems to work well enough for stackoverflow.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#120
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it does make hiring easier. It doesn't making hiring -good people- easier.

Right, and why would you want to make it easier to hire bad people?

It might be better to have an average programmer than no programmer at all.
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