I like .NET but have no interest in Windows.
Without Visual Studio, .NET isn't half as nice a development experience. (I wish Mono would take the same "native UI is important" approach to the desktop IDE as they do to mobile apps).
Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#22The culture is so important lately, that it is not only .Net Framework that is getting neglected, also Java. It seems start-ups feel that working with Ruby, Python or PHP is the best way to go for every problem. But I do believe is cultural. We are building a start-up with several pieces of the service in .Net. And it has been extremely fast for us development wise. We are a team of multidisciplinary developers, and…
Cultural, depending on your desktop platform. .NET doesn't have an official IDE on any platform than Windows—if you run Linux or Mac, it's too fucking bad. A lot of people who like *nix are precluded from it, without some sort of major workflow change. After getting excited about OSS languages, it's hard to just dump that and go full-stack Microsoft. Hell, a place I just interviewed at literally has everything throug…
> .NET doesn't have an official IDE on any platform than Windows—if you run Linux or Mac, it's too fucking bad
Unofficial, but actually pretty decent (if you are into IDEs) is MonoDevelop.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#23Dupe from 7 Months ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2557461 And we use .Net for our startup :)
Same here.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#24I don't agree that it is mostly culture (and "ego"). Purchasing/licensing software is always a hassle. Even aside from the monetary cost, you need to decide which to buy, go through the purchase process, and sometimes you also have some activation hassle. With open source software, you just download it and use it. If you decide to change to another version of the software or different software entirely, you just do t…
Very good point; the cost consideration. In addition;
1. While building software architecture and designing features day by day, no startup wants to consider licensing schemes of proprietary software as a factor.
2. No startup wants to consider bullshit sales-minded product versions (professional, enterprise...)
3. No startup wants the over-paid software sales people to chase their profits tomorrow by inventing licensing schemes per user, cpu, expires in x years etc.
Startups want flexibility and freedom while innovating. Open Source (for example, Linux, MySQL Server, Rails/Ruby) give all those freedoms.
And innovation requires freedom while thinking.
Edit: I am a former MS solutions architect/programmer who built large web applications using .Net, Commerce Server, Sharepoint and various MS products between 2001-2005. Since 2006 I build exclusively using open source alternatives; and God, what a relief.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#25Strange that the author cites FOSS solely as a cost advantage, disregarding all support and extensibility benefits. I say this as someone who has been called on to grovel through tcpdumps with Linux network stack source in hand, and later hack a new command into the stock memcache server as well as its client extension for Zend.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#26One of the issues that I noticed isn't mentioned is that Cloud servers with Windows are generally more expensive. For example, at Rackspace a 4GB Linux server is $175 / month while a 4GB Windows server is $233. You could use Azure, but then you are truly trapped into the platform.
I love .NET, but my startups are all in Ruby / Python.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#27Network effect.
Why don't startups use erlang? Or postgresql? Or lua?
Developers learn from each other. And they learn based on their work experience. A small team of developers or a single developer makes something using a given set of technologies and then more people are hired to work on it and those people then learn that technology and become proficient with it. And then maybe those developers go elsewhere to start other projects with that technology. It's the same with every skill and every technology.
People use what they know, and they acquire new skills largely from the influence of others. Thus there are skills and technologies that are more popular than others.
P.S. It doesn't help that there are significant roadblocks to switching to .NET such as a change of operating systems (or trying to work with mono) and licensing costs and hassle.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#28As a programmer, would I choose to be a member of a community based on open and free information, one where contributions are open to all of humanity, or a community built to feed the bottom line of a large corporation? Especially considering large profits are possible with with both, why would I choose the latter?
Many non-OSS software programs have a huge community to help developers/users/admins. MSSQL is a good example. You pay for development, support and documentation in addition to lining Redmonds pockets.
In the enterprise the cost of software is a small portion of expenses compared to the cost of developers. For a startup or smaller business, things can be different. But there are large chucks of the software development universe where there aren't OSS solutions, nobody wants to donate their time to do the grunge work.
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#29Re: the BizSpark cost that most folks are talking about
I've been in BizSpark for almost 3 years now (graduation date is April 2012), and hopefully I can add a bit to the conversation. I'll caveat this with the fact that I primarily develop on a MacBook these days and my target environment for most projects is Ubuntu or Debian, in Java and Ruby. However, I still do a fair bit of .NET work, and when I signed up for BizSpark I had the intention of building some .NET products with it. The ultimate reason why I moved on (and this has actually changed since then) from that original idea was that it was a pain in the rear to find a host who would honor your BizSpark licenses. So the choice was either try and deal with that mess, or buy my own gear and run my own infrastructure. I prefer to bootstrap, so like I said, I've moved on.
Anyway, on the cost of BizSpark - you get to keep all the production licenses you spin up in the 3 years or pre-1 million mark. Even if you graduate early, you get to keep, for free, all of those licenses and use the for perpetuity. On top of that, MS (at least for my account, but I'd assume others) has waived the $100 graduation "fee".
That means I've gotten 4 Windows Server and SQL Standard processor licenses for free, which I can use perpetually with no cost. I can also keep all of the dev tools, etc that I was granted via BizSpark, at no cost. And with folks like Amazon now allowing you to supply your own licenses, it makes it easier to put those Windows licenses to work.
I really enjoyed the .NET development I did. The platform has issues like any other, but presents a really integrated environment for just getting something together and getting it out there, and allowing for a pretty significant cost for performance ratio that is supplemented by a really nice core platform (I'm a fan of C#, in particular).
Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t
#30People seem to forget that the software you write has to run somewhere, on a machine, maintained by someone.
It's not that it's overly expensive to buy the Microsoft software, it's not free, but it's also not completely unreasonable. However, if you're able to find a good .Net developer, very often that same person isn't a good Windows Server administrator. Developers who know their way around languages like PHP, Perl or Python are also often more than capable of deploying the servers that are required to run the code later on.
A good Windows administrator cost money, a lot of money. A decent Linux administrator often comes bundled with the developer.
Of cause this isn't always the case that .Net developers are not qualified to run the servers, but I do run into them rather often. I'm meet excellent .Net developers that are completely incapable of configuring IIS, but I've never see a PHP programmer that couldn't setup Apache or a Python developer that couldn't deploy a wsgi application and fire up nginx.
That being said, culture might be the biggest factor of them all.