Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 27 posts

Re: Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?

#11

Post by moowmoow »

It depends heavily on the domain. For B2B operations tooling, the real question isn't which stack to build with — it's which ecosystem your customers are already locked into.

If your target users live in Microsoft 365 + Azure AD, the integration advantages of the MS stack are hard to ignore regardless of technical preference. Same goes for teams deep in the Google Workspace or Atlassian ecosystem.

For our greenfield project we went with Kotlin/Spring + Next.js on the basis that most of our target customers use Jira+Confluence, so Atlassian ecosystem familiarity mattered more than stack choice itself.

Re: Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?

#12

Post by CodeBit26 »

It really depends on the 'time-to-market' requirements. If it's a complex enterprise play, the .NET ecosystem with C# is hard to beat for developer ergonomics and long-term maintenance. However, for a high-performance AI-native startup, I’d likely lean towards a more heterogeneous stack (Python/Rust/Go). The 'Microsoft tax' isn't just about money anymore; it's about the cognitive load of being locked into the Azure-first architectural mindset.

Re: Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?

#13

Post by gethly »

Microsoft lives off of what Oracle, RedHat, HP or even IBM live off - commercial support. To large corporations, having someone to blame and who can vouch for or guarantee fulfilment of signed contracts means more than anything else, because it gives them legal way to offload responsibility and any legal or financial ramifications in case of a mistake. Windows owning the desktop operating system market, for now, is a clear choice for such services. So it depends on your needs rather than general question for value proposition as that depends solely on your specific requirements.

Re: Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?

#15

Post by codegeek »

CodeBit26 wrote: post #12

It really depends on the 'time-to-market' requirements. If it's a complex enterprise play, the .NET ecosystem with C# is hard to beat for developer ergonomics and long-term maintenance. However, for a high-performance AI-native startup, I’d likely lean towards a more heterogeneous stack (Python/Rust/Go). The 'Microsoft tax' isn't just about money anymore; it's about the cognitive load of being locked into the Azure-f…

You can build a .NET application without being locked in the usual MS ecosystem. I am building a greenfield SAAS product in .NET with VueJS and Postgres. Will deploy on AWS, Cloudflare etc.

Re: Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?

#16

Post by CodeBit26 »

codegeek wrote: post #15
CodeBit26 wrote: post #12

It really depends on the 'time-to-market' requirements. If it's a complex enterprise play, the .NET ecosystem with C# is hard to beat for developer ergonomics and long-term maintenance. However, for a high-performance AI-native startup, I’d likely lean towards a more heterogeneous stack (Python/Rust/Go). The 'Microsoft tax' isn't just about money anymore; it's about the cognitive load of being locked into the Azure-f…

You can build a .NET application without being locked in the usual MS ecosystem. I am building a greenfield SAAS product in .NET with VueJS and Postgres. Will deploy on AWS, Cloudflare etc.

Fair point, and using VueJS with Postgres is a great way to decouple the frontend and data layers from the MS ecosystem. My concern was more about the 'default' path many teams take when they go full-stack .NET, but your approach proves that the runtime itself is now truly cross-platform and flexible. Glad to see more people breaking the traditional vendor-lock patterns.

Re: Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?

#18

Post by randyburden »

I chose .NET and C# for my current startup (2 years in), where I'm the founding lead developer, and I'd still make the same call today. We've been very productive, built a lot of solid features, and two years in we have a stable, high-performing set of apps. We're using ASP.NET Razor Pages, Web API, backend services, and a .NET MAUI Blazor Hybrid app that's published to the app stores - all written in C# using the latest .NET version. Some parts run in Azure, other parts run on high-performance GPU servers on Ubuntu. It has felt like a very practical modern stack, not some legacy-only enterprise choice. Also, hiring has been a non-issue as I had no trouble finding solid C# developers.

Re: Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?

#19

Post by mrsmrtss »

codegeek wrote: post #14

I am building a new product from scratch in .NET. Not the full traditional MS stack but just .NET for backend and VueJS for frontend and Postgres for DB. I don't use things like Azure, SQL Server etc but .NET is solid. So yes.

.NET, VueJS, and PostgreSQL are also my preferred stack today. For back-end development, C# .NET is a super productive and performant stack, and it would be foolish to disregard it.

Re: Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?

#20

Post by runjake »

Depends on the audience. If it's entrenched enterprise business software? Probably.

Generally, I'd avoid using legacy DotNet and Windows servers for anything I care about. But the reality is that you often can't, outside of the startup space.

I even occasionally use DotNet on Linux and it's very good. I get the sense that the tier 1 platform for DotNet (non-legacy) is Linux, as far as Microsoft engineers are concerned.

Post reply on HN