Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#11

Post by xpaulbettsx » Tue, May 17, 2011, 7:55 PM UTC

fleitz wrote: post #7

I'm using rails for my company but ruby is definitely not my preferred language. Blocks/Procs/Lambdas (why are there three almost identical constructs?) definitely don't compare to function application / currying. I'd much rather write in F# but I'm worried about all the nice to haves that come with the rails stack, like capistrano or the plugins to serve/upload your assets to S3. (e.g. ASP.NET has HAML but not sass)…

> (e.g. ASP.NET has HAML but not sass)

I fixed that this past weekend :)

http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2011/05/16/announcing-sa...

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#12

Post by chrisaycock » Tue, May 17, 2011, 7:55 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #5

Another answer is it's because most startups are consumer web-focused and MS traditionally hasn't been. ASP.NET was traditionally an enterprise framework. Which got long in the tooth. ASP.NET MVC is quite good, but probably just caught up with the leading FOSS with MVC 3. Give it a year. And in general people aren't doing startups for desktops anymore, although they're still huge in the enterprise, which is why .NET…

Agreed. Distribution is the primary concern of most software vendors (big or small), so mobile developers are going to target Android, iPhone, and in some cases BlackBerry. Microsoft's mobile market share today resembles Apple's desktop market share back in the 1990s.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#13

Post by MartinCron » Tue, May 17, 2011, 7:56 PM UTC

bcrescimanno wrote: post #6

There is a strong perception (whether accurate or not--and I honestly don't know the answer) that it's the same old story with Microsoft: if you go the .NET route, you've gotta buy into the entire Microsoft ecosystem. It's not just .NET that you're choosing; you're also choosing Windows servers, IIS, Visual Studio, etc. If that perception is accurate, it's entirely reasonable to say, "Despite liking a lot of what .NE…

It's not accurate, for what it's worth.

I'm working on a startup with .NET, and while I do use some parts of the MS Ecosystem (Visual Studio, C#, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, IIS) I use plenty of tools that aren't from Microsoft (NUnit, JQuery, Github, ReSharper, TeamCity, DotTrace, DotCover, Selenium).

Any good technologist mixes and matches the things that work best for their solution, right?

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#14

Post by _3u10 » Tue, May 17, 2011, 7:57 PM UTC

vyrotek wrote: post #10

Our startup is based on .Net and hosted on Azure. I don't think I realized just how uncommon this was until we were invited to Microsoft in Redmond and saw the excitement from the developers when they learned that we were a startup. We love the framework. But its definitely not the only stack we use. I also agree that there are bad .Net developers that spoil it for the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the issues se…

Does bizspark include a discount for Azure?

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#15

Post by bmj » Tue, May 17, 2011, 7:57 PM UTC

vyrotek wrote: post #10

Our startup is based on .Net and hosted on Azure. I don't think I realized just how uncommon this was until we were invited to Microsoft in Redmond and saw the excitement from the developers when they learned that we were a startup. We love the framework. But its definitely not the only stack we use. I also agree that there are bad .Net developers that spoil it for the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the issues se…

I agree, and the shop where I'm employed is the same--we do lots of .NET development, but other products are built on other technologies.

As far as bad devs go, don't they exist for most platforms? I mean, is every Ruby programmer a genius?

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#16

Post by mpakes » Tue, May 17, 2011, 7:57 PM UTC

sofuture wrote: post #2

The real answer is just as much about our industry’s culture as it is about technology. No, it's entirely about our industry's culture. Which is a shame. It's a fantastic framework that should and could supplant the JVM. It never will though, thanks to Microsoft's boneheaded choices and the blog posts like 'Why I don't hire .Net developers'.

> It's a fantastic framework that should and could supplant the JVM.

What makes you feel that .NET is so superior to the JVM? The JVM itself seems like a solid, performant VM platform, and there is a broad selection of languages in Scala, Groovy, Clojure, JRuby, Jython and friends.

Disclaimer: I'm platform agnostic and don't currently develop on the JVM or the .NET CLR, so I have no horse in this race. I'm genuinely curious.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#17

Post by jbhelms » Tue, May 17, 2011, 7:58 PM UTC

_3u10 wrote: post #14

vyrotek wrote: post #10

Our startup is based on .Net and hosted on Azure. I don't think I realized just how uncommon this was until we were invited to Microsoft in Redmond and saw the excitement from the developers when they learned that we were a startup. We love the framework. But its definitely not the only stack we use. I also agree that there are bad .Net developers that spoil it for the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the issues se…

Does bizspark include a discount for Azure?

Free 1,500 hours of the Small Instance

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#18

Post by fleitz » Tue, May 17, 2011, 7:59 PM UTC

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #11

fleitz wrote: post #7

I'm using rails for my company but ruby is definitely not my preferred language. Blocks/Procs/Lambdas (why are there three almost identical constructs?) definitely don't compare to function application / currying. I'd much rather write in F# but I'm worried about all the nice to haves that come with the rails stack, like capistrano or the plugins to serve/upload your assets to S3. (e.g. ASP.NET has HAML but not sass)…

> (e.g. ASP.NET has HAML but not sass) I fixed that this past weekend :) http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2011/05/16/announcing-sa...

You rock! You've tempted me to start using F# / ASP.NET MVC again.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#19

Post by jswinghammer » Tue, May 17, 2011, 8:00 PM UTC

My startup uses .Net which I chose for the basic reason that I know it very well and I didn't have time to go learn something else while I was trying to get work done. Any server I add is in response to more paying customers so the cost doesn't matter at all. It cuts into the margin a little but I only add new servers when we add a lot of new business. The initial cost of VS.Net was annoying but it wasn't bad and I was able to run off of SQL Server 2008 Express for a very long time.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#20

Post by guard-of-terra » Tue, May 17, 2011, 8:01 PM UTC

sofuture wrote: post #2

The real answer is just as much about our industry’s culture as it is about technology. No, it's entirely about our industry's culture. Which is a shame. It's a fantastic framework that should and could supplant the JVM. It never will though, thanks to Microsoft's boneheaded choices and the blog posts like 'Why I don't hire .Net developers'.

The problem is Microsoft. .Net would be a perfect thing if it wasn't fully owned my MS, in which case it probably won't be far as perfect.

However, you have to use MS OS, MS development tools, MS deployment - and it's pretty painful especially because you can't use shiny macbooks any longer :) If you try to replace any element of that chain, you're on your own entirely.

On other hand, MS ecosystem is smaller than non-MS. For example, what does it have for non-relational storages? Stack Overflow started from pure-MS infrastructure and it's 50/50% already - redis, linux frontend proxies.