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Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

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Re: Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

#21

Post by royjacobs »

I work at a company where we have built one of our products (a large distributed system that tracks television content worldwide) completely on .NET. I love C#, it's a very decent blend between a whole lot of languages and additions of LINQ and async/await kept it relevant. Visual Studio is the best IDE I've worked with, not because it's such a good editor but because it has a sane debugger that is actually helpful.

I still wouldn't run my startup on .NET though, for a number of reasons. Mono simply isn't there yet. Code that works fine on Windows mysteriously stops working on Mono due to threading or GC vagaries (yes, even in the latest version). This isn't a dealbreaker, but it is pretty annoying especially since debugging these kinds of problems are of precisely the kind that I don't want to debug.

The ecosystem is really quite poor compared to, say, JVM or Node. For all the faults of either, there is a LOT of stuff going on and there is a LOT of innovation that is sorely lacking from the .NET world. .NET usually catches up eventually but it's either late or half-hearted (just look at the progress of NHibernate vs. Hibernate).

I think ASP.NET vNext is a step in a very good direction and I hope to be able to change my opinion sometime next year.

Re: Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

#22

Post by ehurrell »

onion2k wrote: post #7

When you're choosing a tech stack in a startup there's a very important factor to consider that this article neglects to mention. It's likely, if you have any measure of success or you go down the investment route, that you'll be expanding your technical team quite early. The availability and cost of developers is critical at the beginning. Building in languages like PHP, JS, Java, and to a lesser extend Perl and Pyt…

Absolutely true, and so often missed. While it may be true that a good programmer can learn any language the cost of this is time, and nowhere is the phrase 'time is money' more true than in a startup.

Re: Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

#23

Post by [deleted] »

steviee wrote: post #8

Is your post about C# or the .NET stack? I can (somewhat) relate to using C# over some other languages. However what I cannot relate to is being trapped with the .NET stack. And a trap it is. You need expensive Windows Servers to host your stuff and Windows just disqualifies itself as a server platform (my subjective opinion). Having to use a powerful latest-tech machine and very recent OS version (2012?) with loads…

[deleted]

Re: Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

#24

Post by mkohlmyr »

ryanmim wrote: post #13

There are two people talking in my head while I read this post. One says : Too many people obsess about backends. Yes, build your startup in C# and a .NET stack if that's what your familiar with. The backend ultimately doesn't matter, and the faster you can create and then iterate on your product, the better off you'll be. The primary factor that will decide whether your startup is successful or not is if people like…

If there's a good chance you are going to have other developers get involved in the codebase then other considerations come up. E.g. how easy it is to find such a developer, how competitive pay is for the platform, how well established coding standards are to ease collaboration, what type of developer you want to attract (likelihood of being full-stack, willingness to learn about new technologies, experience, ..).

Not to say .NET can't still be the right choice. Just that there are other points to consider other than strictly personal preference. You could argue for an MVP this isn't the case but honestly I think being in a position where you have to do a full rewrite a year later is in some ways worse than facing a (hopefully slight) learning curve when starting out.

Re: Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

#25

Post by arethuza »

PyErr_SetString wrote: post #15
arethuza wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see people having reservations about C# for many reasons - mainly as to how closely it is tied to Microsoft and to Windows (yes, I know it is cross platform, but the focus of the eco-system in very much on Windows) - but I can't see the quality of the design of the language being much cause for concern. Personally, I think it's one of the nicer languages in that particular space at the moment - certainly much n…

"I know it is cross platform, but the focus of the eco-system in very much on Windows." There's a funny thing about its cross-platform nature: You almost never see C# apps on other platforms. Why is that? There must be thousands of useful C#/.Net applications made that other platforms could benefit from, but the ONLY ones I've seen are the ones that targeted Mono to begin with. Nothing else. Something fishy is going…

What about Xamarin though:

https://xamarin.com/

I've been kind of avoiding mobile development after getting my fingers slightly singed by spending too much time with jQuery Mobile before giving up - the one thing that tempts me to try doing some mobile development is the Xamarin tool set.

Re: Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

#26

Post by darylteo »

royjacobs wrote: post #21

I work at a company where we have built one of our products (a large distributed system that tracks television content worldwide) completely on .NET. I love C#, it's a very decent blend between a whole lot of languages and additions of LINQ and async/await kept it relevant. Visual Studio is the best IDE I've worked with, not because it's such a good editor but because it has a sane debugger that is actually helpful.…

> NHibernate vs. Hibernate

As a counter argument to that (specifically), we don't really need NHibernate when we have Entity Framework.

Re: Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

#27

Post by doczoidberg »

blibble wrote: post #11

there's nothing in that post that gives C# a measurable advantage over say, Java. Visual Studio Express? still way behind JetBrains IntelliJ (the community edition is FOSS). Visual Studio is unusable without JetBrains Resharper, which isn't cheap. Azure? AWS Bizspark? not required for Java dev as everything's free and OSS anyway. Popularity? most popular .net libraries/tools (NUnit, NAnt, NHibernate) are all clones o…

a measurable advantage of c# over java is LINQ.

Re: Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

#28

Post by royjacobs »

darylteo wrote: post #26
royjacobs wrote: post #21

I work at a company where we have built one of our products (a large distributed system that tracks television content worldwide) completely on .NET. I love C#, it's a very decent blend between a whole lot of languages and additions of LINQ and async/await kept it relevant. Visual Studio is the best IDE I've worked with, not because it's such a good editor but because it has a sane debugger that is actually helpful.…

> NHibernate vs. Hibernate As a counter argument to that (specifically), we don't really need NHibernate when we have Entity Framework.

When you start from scratch I'd agree with you, but if you want to interface with a legacy database and you need some more esoteric mappings and user-defined types then I'm not sure how happy you'd be with EF.

Re: Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

#29

Post by steviee »

darylteo wrote: post #26
royjacobs wrote: post #21

I work at a company where we have built one of our products (a large distributed system that tracks television content worldwide) completely on .NET. I love C#, it's a very decent blend between a whole lot of languages and additions of LINQ and async/await kept it relevant. Visual Studio is the best IDE I've worked with, not because it's such a good editor but because it has a sane debugger that is actually helpful.…

> NHibernate vs. Hibernate As a counter argument to that (specifically), we don't really need NHibernate when we have Entity Framework.

As a counter-counter point: You absolutely need NHibernate (or something else) when you use EF.

Steviee

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