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Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

piehead.com

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

#151

Post by bxr »

MichaelGG wrote: post #87
gfodor wrote: post #29

Closed source. If it breaks (really breaks) I (or anyone without a Microsoft badge) can't fix it. And if they do fix it, it will take a while for the patch to get to me. Pretty simple if you ask me.

Well, the number of engineers that can actually patch something, in say, the JVM, are rather limited. So I'm not sure open source is nearly as big a deal as it's made out to be, as far as patching goes. You do have a point on release cycles, but that's not inherently about being closed source.

>Well, the number of engineers that can actually patch something, in say, the JVM, are rather limited. So I'm not sure open source is nearly as big a deal as it's made out to be, as far as patching goes.

Rather limited? Thats just not a good excuse where I'm coming from. If I need a bug fixed, it doesn't matter I don't know jack about the JVM today, if the cheapest way for me to fix the bug is to jump in myself, I'm going to become a member of that very limited group that can patch the JVM.

It would be nice if we were developing in an environment that we could throw our hands up and walk away, but in the project I'm working on, we've already had to dig very deep into opensource components of our stack to fix their bugs that would have blocked us from shipping.

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

#152

Post by woogychuck »

palish wrote: post #147
woogychuck wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Bad_User (if that is your real name), Just to back up what I wrote in the article. I've worked with 2 start-ups. Both had a major feature release every 4-6 months with minor releases every month or two. At Piehead, most of our projects are less than 2 months from client sign-off to launch. Based on talking with other developers in the Boston area, these timeframes seemed pretty similar to what they were seeing at…

Don't word your responses so harshly. It discredits you.

Sorry about that. It was a bit passive aggressive.

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

#153

Post by woogychuck »

Hey all, I'm the original author and I saw this popup, so I figured I post a quick comment.

A lot of people have pointed out that I didn't really include and example of a start-up using, which is a legit point. If you're interested in seeing a good example, check out http://stackoverflow.com They're a great example of a company that's very open about their experiences with .NET (both good and bad) and they generally post them on their blog at http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/aspnet/

If you have specific questions, feel free to reply and I will do my best to answer them.

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

#154

Post by arjunnarayan »

Why wouldn't a startup that I start use .NET? Because it's too late. The time to catch me was 5-10 years ago - when I was a middle school/high school code monkey playing with the Linux/GNU/gcc stack.

Now it's simply too late. Sure, I could and would invest time and money if your stack was orders of magnitude better. And I often do learn and use new stacks (the ML family; common Lisp) if they happen to be by far the right environment for the problem at hand. But if .NET is just "Java, but a little better", it's really not worth my time.

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

#155

Post by toast76 »

I've been a .NET developer for close to 10 years. Our last product (UsabilityHub.com) was written in .NET simply because it is what I know.

In reality it doesn't matter how good .NET is, there are two reasons why we didn't use it for our latest venture (BugHerd.com).

1) .NET is always one step behind. When people say .NET for web apps, they really mean MVC. I love it, but the reality is that it's a .NET implementation of what was long since done elsewhere. .NET will always be a step behind. Although I must say, sometimes being the second to implement something is a good thing for stability.

2) Hiring .NET developers means hiring enterprise developers. A huge generalisation here, but that means engineers that have worked in big teams under constant direction. They don't do open source, they don't read other people's code and they aren't used to working autonomously.

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

#156

Post by woogychuck »

patrickk wrote: post #129
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…

Another reason for startups not to use .NET is that Microsoft-based hosting for web apps tends to be more expensive than the other alternatives.

Very true, I actually made a post on my personal blog about that a year or so ago.

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

#157

Post by chrisaycock »

igorgue wrote: post #107
bmj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"I mean, is every Ruby programmer a genius?" Yes, they are geniuses, because of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

That was written in 2004, when Python was nowhere near as popular as it is now. Ruby is also really popular today too, and thus fits in the category that PG was lumping Java in.

If you want a comparatively esoteric language today, try ML or Haskell.

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

#158

Post by josephcooney »

vyrotek wrote: post #127
tmfkmoney wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have both a .Net start-up which is a Bizspark member and a non-.Net start-up. It's not the software costs for me it's the development costs of using .Net that make it tough. .Net developers get paid a lot which means it's expensive to quit your .Net job and form a start-up and it's expensive to hire people to work on your project.

Tell me about it :) My co founder and I were both .Net developers before we quit and started working on IActionable. But its worth it in the end! Edit - Do you have an email where I can reach you to talk about StockYoyo.com?

I see the .NET "culture" has transferred through even to your company name!

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

#159

Post by woogychuck »

arjunnarayan wrote: post #154

Why wouldn't a startup that I start use .NET? Because it's too late. The time to catch me was 5-10 years ago - when I was a middle school/high school code monkey playing with the Linux/GNU/gcc stack. Now it's simply too late. Sure, I could and would invest time and money if your stack was orders of magnitude better. And I often do learn and use new stacks (the ML family; common Lisp) if they happen to be by far the r…

This is very true. Microsoft has not done a good job reaching out to younger developers, which probably hurts them far more than they realize. While I like working with .NET now, I was 100% PHP & Perl dev through high school and college. When I graduated I was hired at a company that built CMS products and needed me to know PHP, ASP.NET and ColdFusion. I realized pretty quickly that my PHP and Perl skills translated pretty well. The hardest thing for me was getting used to writing real apps in an object oriented language.

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

#160

Post by yread »

joelangeway wrote: post #35

I use both .NET and the LAMP stack everyday. I love .NET and C# is a beautiful language. But I have to use Windows to use .NET. There is nothing wrong with Windows, except it doesn't have a very good shell; it doesn't come with the GNU user land; I can't just grep and sed and awk on one line to solve problems and answer questions; when I google for help with stuff like mysql I don't find near as many answers that wou…

> it doesn't have a very good shell

Get a better one then: http://jpsoft.com/tccle_cmd_replacement.html

and terminal: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

>it doesn't come with the GNU user land

just unpack this in PATH http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/UnxUpdates.zip it has grep and awk and sed and all that

> I can't solve problems with SSH

from client side (putty) or server side (http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/)?

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