Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

I don't do .NET currently, but did up until about a year ago and my main dev tools were Emacs and msbuild. I almost never fired up VS.

    However, Microsoft has been running their 
    Bizspark program for a few years, which 
    eliminates most of the startup costs normally 
    associated with employing a .NET framework.

The problem with BizSpark is that it is a ticking time bomb.

When starting a business, you don't really know what will happen in 3 years, but only one thing is certain -- the path to success usually takes more than 3 years.

And unless you've got VC money to burn irresponsibly, why build on top of a stack that you'll probably have to replace? Does it provide more value than the alternatives? When it comes to web services, all evidence is to the contrary.

    At Piehead, we build web applications on a faster 
    pace than almost any startup

This is an unsupported anecdotal evidence.

It also seems incorrect based on the sheer number of businesses I've seen doing kick-ass work with non-MS technologies.

    programmers start to choose technologies based
    on that cultural perception, rather than focusing 
    on the best approach for the kinds software they 
    want to build

This implies that .NET is the best approach for certain kinds of software - the article does nothing to name them. Which is IMHO, not the best way to advocate for the usage of .NET.

And again, all evidence is to the contrary - most popular web-services online are not built with MS technologies, with a few exceptions that you could count by using the fingers on one hand. And what else, other than ASP.NET-powered web applications? For client-apps targeted to consumers? For mobile apps? Again, all evidence is to the contrary.

Besides the price and the interoperability story - another reason would be that Microsoft is currently a follower.

Besides a couple of exceptions, which are small in scope, Microsoft currently does nothing but to copy ideas taken from (shock and horror) open-source projects. Sorry, but innovation happens somewhere else.

I also like being able to be in control. Even if I don't know the internals of some component I'm using, I like being able getting in touch with the core developers of that component and ask them nicely or pay them directly to fix it for me. And if that component is valuable to me, I also like being able to improve it myself.

Open-source gives you that, Microsoft software doesn't.

As an enterprise software stack, .NET may be fine and competitive. However, the reasons that make it a good enterprise stack work against it in the startup space.

Take the example of a web page returning JSON. In Rails there's a prescribed way to do this. It is generally straight forward and one gets it done literally after 5 minutes of tutorials.

In .NET, you have to install the WCF REST stack, learn about endpoints, bindings, the difference between Raw, and wrapped formats, then there are authorization behaviors (tokens, windows integrated etc etc). Mess around with service hosts in IIS and then pray it works. With everything being pluggable, there is no simple prescriptive method to get code working and moving on to the next feature. The stack is so complicated that blog posts even by MS employees contain errors which stay uncorrected. I have spent two days trying to figure out what is the best practice for uploading a large file to a web service and the combination of options are simply bewildering and with so many parts one wonders if it is going to work at all.

Now imagine this struggle being repeated in every aspect of your development. You will spend the day stepping through Factories and Hosts and Locators using Reflector.exe before finding the little bit of code that does what you want. Then you swear at MS because it is marked "internal" and you can't monkey patch it.

This syndrome is in part due to the size of Microsoft. MS would never dare release software that wasn't pluggable because it has a big audience and big audiences want a clear delineation between what is their code and what is maintained by Microsoft. The startup ecosystem just wants to hack code until it works and get things done. No startup developer can really devote the necessary time to the study of large software stacks before sending out a piece of string.

MS has done an outstanding back-to-basics job with WebMatrix and its PHP-like simplicity. However, it is still a long way behind in other respect.

For example, MS doesn't cultivate a community the way open source projects do. There is no central place to find able consultants, or centralized Planet-style feeds, or given provide a site where users can contribute tutorials. The employees are answering forums in their free time (I saw some post at midnight, and this is devotion, but the msdn forums are literary broken - you can see the answers being doubled up in the rendered page but no one fixes them). The experience simply reeks of helplessness on the poor MS-employees' part because someone else in the company has created such a shitty place for developer interaction.

Is it really a problem to pay for the software you run when you make more than $1M/year in revenue?

I am a knee-jerk Microsoft hater (with reasons I won't bore you with). Last fall I saw a bank developer giving a demo of how to build a system using F# and accessing the the windows GUIs library on .Net. I have to say it was very, very nice and powerful. I was half tempted...