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My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

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Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#191

Post by hackinthebochs »

RyanZAG wrote: post #175
hackinthebochs wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but feel like you're trolling. Eclipse is a slow, bloated, feature-laking pile of crap. I honestly can't believe anyone would prefer it to, well, just about anything else. I've used it and I get by on it when necessary, but in terms of preference its at the bottom of my list.

Rubbish. Use the latest version with an SSD with 8GB ram and it flies - SSD and ram are cheap enough to not be a barrier to entry, either. It's got more features than any other IDE I can think of, as well as a pretty huge library of plugins. Sounds like you're the one that is trolling. If Eclipse really was that bad, nobody would use it, and it wouldn't be probably the most widely used IDE in the world.

>If Eclipse really was that bad, nobody would use it, and it wouldn't be probably the most widely used IDE in the world

I don't think this means much. It has (poor) support for just about every language under the sun and its free so of course its going to be widely used. It has many features for Java, but features for other languages quickly fall off a cliff. But its the slowness that is a showstopper for me unless I absolutely must go with eclipse. Yes, eventually computer technology will advance to the point where its bloated codebase is no longer a liability, and perhaps we're approaching that. I use the Juno release occasionally for python programming and everything I've mentioned still applies.

Personally I'm not a big fan of plugins in my IDEs: they always feel slow and clunky with a "bolted on" feel. This has been true of every IDE + plugin environment I've tried so far.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#192

Post by sljd »

regularfry wrote: post #173
twistedpair wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case porting FROM it should be simple. TO it would be hard if you're using all those fancy features of your current DB. That's why I eschew all the sirens from Oracle DBA's of "oh... but Oracle can do that too!" Keep database activities in the database and application activities in the app.

In my experience, MySQL lets you get into a state where questions like "hang, on - what's the difference between a DATE of '0000-00-00' and NULL?" are commonplace. This makes porting from it... not simple.

Or what you're saying is that if you store a date of zero VALUE to MySQL it could be magically replaced by NULL internally? That would be really crazy.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#193

Post by anoymous9352 »

adventured wrote: post #171
lazyjones wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget StackOverflow: http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/8/5/stack-overflow-arch... - apart from the somewhat unbelievable PlentyOffish project, it's the only prestige project based on MS software most people will recall. In their 2011 update, they claimed to be using "a lot more Linux machines", because apparently it's fun to develop using Microsoft technology, but for some infrastructure components (proxyin…

Plenty Of Fish shouldn't be considered unbelievable. I've been following information about their infrastructure from the first moment they posted about it. There's nothing unbelievable about it at all. Over the years he has openly described changes to the site's setup as they've scaled, and it makes fine sense. Stack isn't the only prestige product. Nearly all of Microsoft's infrastructure runs on their own dog food.…

Azure offering support for Linux shows how much faith Microsoft have in their own crap.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#194

Post by toomuchtodo »

pjmlp wrote: post #182
toomuchtodo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, great. Stackoverflow and Newegg. Amazon? Linux. Google? Linux. Apple? Linux. Large Hadron Collider? All. Linux. Using Microsoft server in a production environment? Gonna have a bad time. There's a reason most sane people don't use it in important places. I don't hate on Microsoft server products because its in fashion. Its because I like to sleep at night.

> Large Hadron Collider? All. Linux. True if you are speaking about the custom built machines doing real time data analysis. However, many users have Mac OS X and Windows as their desktop machines. When I was there (2003-2004), quite a few researchers were even moving away from LaTeX to Word and FrameMaker. There are a few ASP.NET servers at CERN.

I was at Tier1 (Fermilab). All the servers were Linux, and everyone's desktop was either a Mac or a Linux box.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#195

Post by hkarthik »

pmelendez wrote: post #89
hkarthik wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, he could easily be using a JVM-based stack to get the same or better efficiency out of his 1-server configuration. Also there's some clearly naivety when bragging about his "low cost" $200/month setup. His SQL Server licenses alone will probably triple or quadruple his costs when his Bizspark status runs out.

>"I agree, he could easily be using a JVM-based stack" Maybe but believe it or not, there are people who HATE Java (that would includes me)

Oh you're not alone. I dislike Java as well, but there's no denying the power of the JVM and the ecosystem around it. If you really dig into it and look at it as a polyglot platform with choices like Groovy, Clojure, JRuby, and Scala, it becomes more palatable.

Regardless this post is not about .NET tooling, more about server efficiency and cost. Two areas where I think the JVM is a little further ahead.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#196

Post by moskie »

RyanZAG wrote: post #170
moskie wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could just as easily scoff at someone for basing their business off of "open source community supported" tools. But, instead, the realistic position is to understand Microsoft's tools and programs will be a decent choice for years to come, just as using FOSS would be.

How is that even remotely comparable? I'm not saying anything about the quality of using MS tools - they're great - but they have a fee attached. They specifically say you will need to pay that fee within X years. Pretending the fee doesn't exist because you don't have to pay it until next year is what I'm scoffing at. Not the tools, the idea that MS will continue to make their expensive tools free when they have put…

We might be talking past each other here. No one is saying that it's a good business plan to assume that programs like BizSpark will never run out. That is of course a bad idea. But since no one suggested that, I assumed you were saying that using things like BizSpark at all is a bad idea.... which is not the case.

A valid business plan can be created that involves the pricing structures that Microsoft gives. You can have a plan that involves using a program from MS that gives you their software for free now, with the idea that you will eventually be able to afford to pay for them. Any company worth existing should be able to afford it eventually.

And, hey, look, it even happens that those windows of time can be extended. No one is saying that it would be a good business plan to rely on programs like BizSpark never ending... but it's still worth mentioning that MS has been forgiving if things don't go exactly as planned, and provides a way to delay the fees kicking in.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#197

Post by etherael »

Retric wrote: post #138
etherael wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL databases in general don't scale well once they've maxed out a single machine, cross server joins are never going to be pretty and there's a pretty good reason why denormalising data and the adoption of NoSQL solutions with baked in clustering is taking off in a big way. Re NoSQL solutions on windows, theoretically possible, sure, but which NoSQL solution targets windows as its primary platform rather than an aft…

In our tests NoSQL was far slower than SQL solutions the advantage was it dealt with hardware failures more easily, but if you use 5% as much hardware it's far less of an issue. Edit: I think one of the largest probmems is most developers doin't understand SQL or databases that well. Indexed Views for example are an incredibly efficient tools that allow you to avoid a lot of expensive joins without the normal risks o…

Last I saw cassandra and pgsql were pretty close to even on single systems, but you can push as many shards in a cassandra cluster as you want. Where are you getting 5% from? Do you mean to imply sql is typically 20x faster than NoSQL on comparable hardware prior to clustering?

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#198

Post by hapless »

sljd wrote: post #192
regularfry wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, MySQL lets you get into a state where questions like "hang, on - what's the difference between a DATE of '0000-00-00' and NULL?" are commonplace. This makes porting from it... not simple.

Or what you're saying is that if you store a date of zero VALUE to MySQL it could be magically replaced by NULL internally? That would be really crazy.

I seem to recall it is actually the other way around, and storing a null results in a nonsense date.

Added bonus: some versions will segfault if you pass an un-formattable date value.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#199

Post by pjmlp »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #194
pjmlp wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Large Hadron Collider? All. Linux. True if you are speaking about the custom built machines doing real time data analysis. However, many users have Mac OS X and Windows as their desktop machines. When I was there (2003-2004), quite a few researchers were even moving away from LaTeX to Word and FrameMaker. There are a few ASP.NET servers at CERN.

I was at Tier1 (Fermilab). All the servers were Linux, and everyone's desktop was either a Mac or a Linux box.

Atlas HLT EP group.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#200

Post by dexterchief »

adventured wrote: post #185
etherael wrote: post #116

2 SP3's from OVH would be both cheaper (89*2) and have way, way more bang for the buck than a single weak amazon instance. (E3 1245v2 8 ht cores @ 3.4ghz , 2 x 120GB SSD in soft raid and 32gb memory) If you wanted to run windows on those, you'd need to buy two licenses pushing an extra 50$ a month onto the price. You also wouldn't need to screw around with spawned instances in failover, and you could actually use the…

As another commenter noted, you do not get hammered on cost when you exit BizSpark - "When you exit the program you get to keep all licenses free with all future patches. We exited the program 2 years ago and have yet to buy a MS license for IIS or SQL."

This really makes no sense. Pointing to someone who is 5 years into learning the Microsoft ecosystem and who got their last software update two years ago is the worst possible way to prove you don't get "hammered" when you leave Bizspark.

Are we really going to pretend that never upgrading their software is an option?

For the sake of technical correctness, I'll agree with you, yes its true that you don't get "hammered" when you leave Bizspark.

You get "hammered" when you get 5-7 years into the Microsoft ecosystem and realize that you can no longer put off the software upgrades.

At that point you have to do the math and figure out which is cheaper:

throwing away most of what you have learned and rewriting your software using completely different language and ecosystem

OR

Dropping "5 figures" on software licenses.

Where does the "5 figures" figure come from? An InfoQ interview with the guys behind Tekpub who dropped MS for Rails after being in Bizspark:

"RB: If the platform was holding up fine, what prompted the change of architecture?

RC: Money. We were enrolled in Microsoft BizSpark Program and it was great for getting off the ground, but projecting into the future we realized that everything - from our database down to our development environment would have to be paid for after 3 years. We also figured that we'd probably need a separate server to run videos properly (for streaming) to Silverlight (using Streaming Media) which would be another license cost - and, in addition, we'd need to buy Media Encoder in order to encode the video for Smooth Streaming.

This might not be an issue for a large company, but when we sat down to assess what the bills would be - well let's just say that it was about 5 figures. We put our business hats on and tried to justify that cost - and we couldn't.

Not only that, James and I both knew Rails pretty well. We realized we could push everything into the cloud with better streaming and throughput for a microscopic fraction of the price - so that's what we did.

JA: As Rob mentioned cost was one of the factors, BizSpark is great but it is basically a ticking time bomb. I think more than cost though the motivating factor was around what we both wanted to be using day to day. ASP.NET MVC and .NET are very lacking in some areas that are very important to us. The testing story on .NET is not the best, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to design your application in the right way to handle testing and then writing the tests themselves is not as clean or usable as some other languages. One of the other areas of high friction was deployment, there are ways to handle it in .NET but nothing as nice or clean as Capistrano.

RB: So what does the TekPub platform look like today?

RC: We moved to Rails 2.3.5 using MongoMapper against MongoDB. We have a reporting setup that uses MySQL to track stuff we need to report on which uses DataMapper. We also plugged in New Relic RPM to keep track of our site and it's health - all of this is less than 1% of what it would have cost us, on average, with BizSpark. "

http://www.infoq.com/articles/architecting-tekpub

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