11–20 of 103 posts
You don't want to be struggling to show hello world on a page with an unknown framework compared to building your actual product with a language you know.
I've written many projects in PHP and .Net.
My latest startup is all .Net and the right choice.
Is Mono viable for server these days?
Mono is, yes. If you use a non-Microsoft stack to host an ASP.NET site (OWIN, Nancy on OWIN), then even more so. Nancy+OWIN+Mono+nginx is a very good stack.
Is Mono viable for server these days?
Details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/05/12/the-next-g...
It's about making something people want -- even if you have to do it using clipboards, rubber bands, and duct tape. If they want it, you can figure out the tech later. That's the easy part. The hard part is connecting with people you can help.
It won't make a blind bit of difference initially but if you expand, so will tooling and deployment costs and investors don't like that. Anything that takes off the bottom line is a problem. Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else.
We're like that now. Our SQL licensing is shaping our architecture not on technical merit but avoiding core license costs. That is beyond bad but we can't justify a £200k spend on licenses and kit to get rid of 2008R2.
Inevitably bits of Python are now appearing around the edges of the product and trying to stab the core. There are a couple of postgresql machines doing ancillary work. All the staff are slowly moving their operational task over because there isn't a purchase process.
This is the price of success though :)
Edit: just to add that the last two companies I worked for are Python/java/postgres houses now after being end to end MS outfits. The staff change over the lifecycle of a product. You can afford better people after time and better people seem to prefer to use other platforms even if they market themselves as .Net people.
Edit 2: also once you're locked in, volume licensing looks cost efficient. Then after a couple of yeara you get a call from the sales guys at MS who want to do a 'soft audit' (which it says they can so in the VL agreement). Then battle commences between MS, yourselves and the disty who handles your VL over how much you owe. This usually starts at £150k-ish for an SME and your ops team will be down for days whilst they work that down. Our liability was less than £10k which is within the VL safe zone but other companies are less lucky. Also the VL settlement says you can't discuss it but fuck them - the company this was against is dissolved.
Actually I look at my post and I couldn't possibly recommend it. If we'd started differently we could afford to be employ and sponsor postgres core team staff for example and gave second to none support and a positive impact on the community. Instead, pockets are lined elsewhere.
If you have a great product that you can get live quickly and works then it won't matter if you even write it in COBOL (don't write it in COBOL though) - ASP.Net & SQl Server (even the free version) also work very well together and have great performance. There are of course licensing costs if you run on Windows and don't use MONO but these shouldn't really be an issue in comparison to all your other costs Also there…
Oh and the instrumentation and debugging past the bits of code you wrote and the .Net runtime core libraries is utterly horrible.
See some of my earlier comments about this matter.
I'd rather build on the JVM now thanks to tools like VisualVM and profilers that can be deployed across the team for free.
Is Mono viable for server these days?
Mono is, yes. If you use a non-Microsoft stack to host an ASP.NET site (OWIN, Nancy on OWIN), then even more so. Nancy+OWIN+Mono+nginx is a very good stack.
I always liked C# but windows server for me is a complete showstopper, I'm too comfortable in unix envs for sysadmin/devops. Well also for desktop actually :)