41–50 of 103 posts
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.
But, as perspective, MS Dev tools cost about $10K per dev + $3K per year per dev after the first. Engineers costs $100K+ per year. +10% productivity covers the tools. If it costs you a month to retool or saves you a little on salary or lets you hire a little easier, you have paid for the tools. So what matters are things where you get x3 productivity or x3 better ability to hire.
Also, I think you are asking the wrong question. The problem you are trying to solve drives the platform decision and language (even DB) are only a small part of the equation. Amazon works just fine with C#/.Net and it is cheap to free at first. To get a fair comparison at scale, you need to include the price of EC2 instances against a dedicated self-hosted database server. Depending on your application, you'll get very different answers.
In your shoes (based on limited info), I would try to get into the BizSpark Cloud program. It is free MS software plus a big credit on Azure for three years. Then count on the price war between Amazon/Google/Azure to keep prices in line.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We were a gold partner. There are no reasonable discounts over what you pay. Add to that the support isn't any better than the pay per incident support. Action pack is reasonable value but you can't use it to deploy production kit on. Not only that the definition of internal use is so vague it's a risk. We got an audit. It wasn't cheap to sort out what we thought was in compliance.
Of course you cannot use the software from a partner program externally. It was only concerning development licensing.
At that point we stopped playing word games and threw our devops infrastructure on Linux.
I've been in this situation a couple of times before. 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'r…
ASP.NET is moving at an incredible pace, the new vNext bits are planned to be officially cross-platform and you can support any number of database backends from a .NET codebase.
I also challenge your assertion that better people seem to use other platforms. You can find people marketing themselves as one thing but preferring another in any stack. This is not indicative of anything more than someone needing a job and meeting the requirements of a posting.
Licensing costs can vary. Between BizSpark, DreamSpark and other programs you can get dev tools out of the way quickly. They also provide Windows licensing for the period you're in the program.
The areas where you can get in real trouble as a startup with Microsoft are the add-on product stacks like SQL Server and BizTalk (shudder). I would avoid these in a new product but do not fear building with the .NET platform.
Don't worry about suitors - worry about hiring people. Team matters much more than Tech. But, as perspective, MS Dev tools cost about $10K per dev + $3K per year per dev after the first. Engineers costs $100K+ per year. +10% productivity covers the tools. If it costs you a month to retool or saves you a little on salary or lets you hire a little easier, you have paid for the tools. So what matters are things where yo…
That's a bold claim to say using MS Dev tools are sure to increase productivity by 10%. Have anything to back that up? [e.g. studies, not your opinion or anecdotes].
And +10% productivity compared to what? Using C#/.Net without MS tools? Or compared to using a different stack (which seemed to be the OP's question)?
For that reason .net doesn't seem to fly much in the B2C area, but is quite common for B2B stuff.
I've been in this situation a couple of times before. 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'r…
I think you've tied your entire response to SQL Server rather than the .NET stack so I'll do the same from an ASP.NET aspect.. ASP.NET is moving at an incredible pace, the new vNext bits are planned to be officially cross-platform and you can support any number of database backends from a .NET codebase. I also challenge your assertion that better people seem to use other platforms. You can find people marketing thems…
Asp.net v.next is currently a bag of promises. I wouldn't put a product near it for a long time. I back this assertion up with the promises of Velocity, EF4, SilverLight and WF4, all of which were disasterous piles of immature crud that disappeared after a bit leading to massive rewrites. Even MVC has a patchy history and numerous problems in it now (crazy API churn, attribute lifecycle/scope, memory ceiling, routing performance etc are all ones that I've spent days on...). Generally the entire web and enterprise teams have knocked out low quality rubbish for years.
People who advertise themselves as .net developers (as I do) know how to get paid a lot, not necessarily deliver the best solution for the money. There are those of us however who have fingers in many pots who know how greener the grass is and how organisations would benefit from a change and are taken on to fix the tech stack.
Agree with your assertion about BizTalk but mno further.
I've been in this situation a couple of times before. 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'r…
I've been in this situation a couple of times before. 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'r…
This entire argument breaks down if you go for e.g. Postgres and Mono/Linux. We do exactly this and it works great. The parts where .NET really shines are all open source (or have a good OS implementation, such as Mono).
I've been in this situation a couple of times before. 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'r…