Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

And the other 40% of the web ... well, it's cheap and has low barriers to entry. That does not mean it's great.

For one, PHP (any language actually) is it's syntax and libs.

So, that they "threw away the rest" is not an argument against PHP. People also run Rails on different rubies (JRuby/Rubinious/Ruby EE etc), so what?

And they "threw" those for performance reasons, not for some better, purer language. If they had enough problems with PHPs performance to write a C++ compiler for it, you think they would have faired better if they started with something like Rails?

Second, yeah, with multi billions revenue and nearly a bln users, yeah, I'd say it turned out pretty well for them. Proves that you can get pro --it doesn't get any more pro than FB in the web business-- without using expensive tools or the language du jour.

"""And the other 40% of the web ... well, it's cheap and has low barriers to entry. That does not mean it's great."""

There are Drupal/Wordpress sites that are among the best of the world...

I don't know what you mean by "cheap" in this context. Is whitehouse.gov cheap?

--Bizspark/Azure-- We signed up for Azure, which took about 10 minutes to fill out a couple web forms describing what we were doing and provided a link to our "coming soon" page. Five days later we were accepted and within 30 minutes we had our Ultimate MSDN subscription and Azure account created. But it wasn't really about the MSDN subscription (which is a nice bonus, though), as we already had Windows 7 installed and we could have used the Express development products just as well as the ultimate ones. In terms of licensing long term, we're not using any of the server licensing, as everything is hosted on Azure. So we'll never have to endure the licensing hell people have referred to. If in 3 years we're not able to pay our hosting bill on Azure then it's time to stop on working on this startup.

On Azure we're taking advantage of the two compute instances, the SQL Server database, and the Blob storage. That's a powerful hosting framework for free. The other options we were considering was Google App Engine with Python/Django, or Heroku with Rails. We had decided on those 3 options because we didn't want to be sysadmins or feel like we needed to hire one. We wanted scability without having to think about it. And since we're not working on a 100 million user project we're not going to need super-customized server optimizations. Being pragmatic about it, going with GAE or Heroku would have been more expensive than free and would have required us to use languages and frameworks we were not 100% familiar with.

--Using what you know-- We would have been deciding to use Rails or Django "just because" with no real benefit. Building a new product is hard enough without trying to learn a new language/framework/server/os. In the past few years I've experimented with Ruby on Rails and various Python frameworks hoping to discover for myself the magic that had captured the hearts of so many developers, but I always kept coming back to .NET when it was a project that required me to be at my best. Deep down I think I wanted to fall in love with Rails or Django because I prefer living in OSX over Win7. Rails just felt like a mess to me, and Django just didn't click. While there is a lot to like about Ruby and Python, my 7 years of experience using C# pays dividends in productivity.

--Lock-in-- People always mention "lock-in" when talking about .NET. But the truth is that there is lock-in with whatever technology you sink your time into. If you spend 6 months building a product in Rails/MySQL/Linux you're just as locked in as you would be if you spent 6 months building in .NET/SQL Server/Win64. Many of the commenters have talked about needing to tweak the OS, tweak the web server, tweak the database server, etc. If you're a new startup worrying about that, then you've already set yourself up for failure through premature optimization. Focus on building your product and getting a few paid users.

Many have also stated that going with .NET means being stuck in MSland and unable to mix and match tech like you would be in OSSland. I think that's a false dichotomy. If we're talking about mixing a web framework with a database, for example, it's very easy to use .NET with Oracle, MySQL, Postgresql, MongoDB, etc. In fact, it's probably easier than with Rails or Django where I remember having a heck of time getting drivers to compile on my Mac. And these days, it's fairly common to use OSS tools with .NET. Microsoft's own ASP.Net MVC, NUnit, Specflow, jQuery, Sass, Coffeescript, etc., to name a few.

If you want to attribute the lions share of success of Facebook to PHP, rather than the social effect and being in the right time in the right place, or other work put into it, that's fine with me. But I'll still disagree.

> they "threw away the rest" is not an argument against PHP.

If replacing the backend (compiler, libs, etc) because it's so buggy and does not scale at all, is not an argument, than nothing will be ... and I'm going to stop here and let this die.