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Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

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

#181

Post by thaumaturgy »

pbz wrote: post #163
thaumaturgy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the culture is a direct result of the Microsoft brand. Many of us have been at this long enough to at least dimly remember Microsoft's antics in the 90s. Others of us are still dealing with other aspects of the Microsoft technology stack, and hating it. For instance, I've spent most of a full work-week with a client recently because their SBS 2008 AD server went haywire. We've been troubleshooting ridiculous netw…

What would you think if I told you I had issues with Linux, drivers crashing, kernel panics, programs not integrating nicely, and for these reasons I choose not to use Ruby?

I would think you are confused. :-)

For one, I don't mind if you don't use Ruby -- I'm not out to evangelize, I'm just responding to one person's response to a simple question: why don't more startups use .NET? I barely care at all what language I use; I have absolutely no interest in what somebody else uses.

But, if I asked you why you don't use Ruby, and you said, "because I have to use Linux and I have all these issues with it", and Linux was developed and supported by the same people that developed and supported Ruby, I'd say, "Fair enough."

I was just pointing out that there's a certain guilt-by-association. I mean, this happens all the time in business. When someone talks about a brand, that brand can bring up certain positive or negative connotations in your mind. If someone were to ask me, "Why aren't you spending any time looking into buying a new GM car", I would say, "Well, for one, because my Honda works just fine, and besides, GM makes crap." Now, GM probably makes at least one really great car -- it's just that I can't be bothered to spend much effort trying to figure out which car that might be.

Branding is really something that all business owners should think about often. When people hear your name or see your brand, what do they associate with it? If you go out of your way to lie, cheat, steal, or screw over your customers now, and you put your brand behind that, what is that going to mean for your business tomorrow? Is anybody going to care if you do an about-face and produce a really great product once they get sick of your brand?

I think Microsoft's brand is irreparably tarnished among the exact crowd that's most likely to launch tech startups, and since most of that crowd already has a language and set of tools that they like, there's literally a negative incentive for most of them when it comes to considering building on the Microsoft platform.

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

#182

Post by kristiandupont »

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…

Is there a reason you chose Azure over AppHarbor or is it just because you have been in business longer than AppHarbor has been available?

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

#183

Post by bad_user »

woogychuck wrote: post #146
bad_user wrote: post #134

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…

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…

     I've worked with 2 start-ups. Both had a major 
     feature release every 4-6 months with minor 
     releases every month or two.
Great, so you've extrapolated your experience to the whole ecosystem. I'm not saying that at Piehead you don't build websites at a faster pace than others, but even if you do, it's a selection bias, since you're only comparing others that are similar to yourself.

Here, I'll give you an example - suppose you want to do natural language parsing, a fairly hot topic these days. Try finding me supporting libs that would do that and that are better documented or mature than NLTK (the Python library), which doesn't work on IronPython btw.

     didn't want to jam a bulleted list of start-up 
     names in the middle of the article
That's too bad, as it would have done more for the point you were trying to make than all the other blabering you wrote.

     almost everybody is a follower in the tech world
Yes, but most valuable projects also add things of value that the original projects didn't.

How's the deployment story these days for .NET? Does it have something like Capistrano yet? Why should I use a half-baked clone of Ruby on Rails, when I can go for the real deal and have thousands of cool plugins to choose from? Why should I use NuGet when you can have the really mature Debian repository and rubygems.org/CPAN/PyPi?

     PHP and Ruby both evolved from Perl
Both innovated in certain ways over Perl, I'm not advocating for revolutions. In both cases you can see clear benefits that those languages / ecosystems provide over Perl.

That's not the case with .NET - it's a proprietary technology, having all the cruft of Java, while not having all the benefits of Java - like a strong community or integration with anything under the sun.

     MVC was in use before half of us were even born
Funny you mention that, because ASP.NET is not MVC. It also makes you jump through hoops to have MVC, mostly because of that braindead postback mechanism.

And not all MVC frameworks are created equal. If you can't see the benefits introduced in ASP.NET MVC that were copied from others and that weren't in existence when half of us were even born, then there's no point in debating any further.

     There are about 20,000 start-ups listed 
     in the BizSpark directory
Then what was your blog post about?

     There are pros and cons to both ecosystems
You aren't showing me any pros of .NET, and that was my whole point. Article is vague and filled with hyperbole.

     If PHP, RoR, Django or some other platform is best for
     your project, use it, but don't hide behind hyperbolic 
     psudeo-facts.
Well, hyperbolic pseudo-facts are countered best with hyperbolic pseudo-facts. Am I right or what?

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

#184

Post by JonoW »

teyc wrote: post #136

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…

> In .NET, you have to install the WCF REST stack

Well you don't have to. If I was just writing services to only return JSON to a web-page, I would just use ASP.NET MVC which has good built in support for this, e.g.

public class MyController : Controller { public ActionResult MyJsonAction(){ return Json(new { Id = 1, Name = "MyName" }); } }

Now you have a url /MyController/MyJsonAction which will return the JSON string { Id: 1, Name: "MyName" }, no stress.

WCF is complicated, but it is powerful too, especially if you need to support multiple bindings (e.g. REST and SOAP endpoints for the same service). Also, if you need to support the SOAP WS-* standards, it's a life-saver.

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

#185

Post by teyc »

JonoW wrote: post #184
teyc wrote: post #136

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…

> In .NET, you have to install the WCF REST stack Well you don't have to. If I was just writing services to only return JSON to a web-page, I would just use ASP.NET MVC which has good built in support for this, e.g. public class MyController : Controller { public ActionResult MyJsonAction(){ return Json(new { Id = 1, Name = "MyName" }); } } Now you have a url /MyController/MyJsonAction which will return the JSON stri…

Thanks. I'm new to MVC. Sounds like MS got their act together on this one.

Complicated is usually overkill for a startup though. This means a big swath of .NET technology is simply not applicable.

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

#186

Post by kennethh »

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.

You can get a windows VPS for 30$ with 1 gig memory that will perform quite well. Ofcourse Linux is cheaper but a licence to Windows Web Server edtion is 15$ a month on most hosting companies. You also have the BizSpark and WebSpark programs where you get it for free (for 3 years). Dont think the hosting cost is going to matter much in most cases. SQL server is expensive but who says you have to use it...

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by gfodor »

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.

This argument is broken because the open source-ness of the ecosystem bleeds all the way up the stack. In Java, you get the source of the JVM, of course, but also the Java frameworks and, generally speaking, most Java projects out there are open source.

On the .NET side, which is a closed source culture, you'll not be able to fix issues with the core framework nor the array of other closed source, commercial frameworks that exist due to this cultural difference.

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

#189

Post by pnathan »

icey wrote: post #101
strlen wrote: post #61

I'd love to use C# or F# for development: they're in my opinion, superior languages to Java and Scala (respectively) -- although Scala has several salient and interesting points (implicits, traits) that F# doesn't. However, I am fairly well wed to Linux/OS X, and don't see myself being productive with Windows (whenever I used Windows, the first application I'd install is Cygwin), nor (having never done Windows System…

If you haven't looked at it yet, you may also like Nemerle - http://nemerle.org You don't really need Windows to write C#, F#, etc. There are emacs modes for them if you like emacs. I'm pretty sure there's an F# module for Monodevelop available. It doesn't help you with the OS situation at all, but Visual Studio express is free from Microsoft should you find yourself on Windows. I know C# better than most of the othe…

IMHO, Nemerle is the .NET language of the future. Possibly much like Common Lisp is the language of the future. ;)

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

#190

Post by blackman »

zmmmmm wrote: post #139
jswinghammer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are my reasons for not using Java: Visual Studio .Net (huge), C# vs Java (C# has WAY more features), SQL Server integration (if you are using it), IIS is pretty much painless to configure and works really well with .Net, LINQ which is a pretty good ORM.

> Visual Studio .Net (huge) Funny, I'm currently in a mode of development where I switch daily between Eclipse/Java and Visual Studio / C#, and as far as I'm concerned Eclipse is the best thing Java has going for it. The refactoring and code navigation are miles ahead of what seems to come with Visual Studio. I find myself renaming methods and classes almost indulgently - just to see if I feel better about the name a…

It hasn't changed much. some syntactic sugar and influence from functional languages has helped C# but the IDE is not as good as eclipse IMO. You can however add a lot of the refactorings and features from eclipse by using jetbrains ReSharper. (I believe they also make a Java IDE too).
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