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I'm not an expert with the Microsoft stack, but aren't there ways to mitigate the costs? I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. What other costs are there specific to the Microsoft stack?
I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...
I'm not an expert with the Microsoft stack, but aren't there ways to mitigate the costs? I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. What other costs are there specific to the Microsoft stack?
I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...
Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people.
I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/Media Encoder and so on.
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx http://www.microsoftstore.com/s/visualstudio
As an MS developer this really is devastating. Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked there (I'd call him the most high profile MS employee aside from Scott Guthrie). To have him come out and say he couldn't make a startup work with Microsoft technology really tells you all you need to know about that. I still need to use .Net at work but I think…
A lot of developers and managers I work with don't seem to realize that what's best for Microsoft isn't necessarily what's best for another company. Instead they get stuck in a cycle of adopting whatever MS throws down the channel (this week it's Entity Framework, last week SOA concepts, etc.). Good MS developers should learn to take what's best from the open source world and apply whatever is most useful behind the…
Let’s be honest about technology for a second: Things go wrong. No matter what solution you use things go wrong and for the most part non-technical management doesn’t understand that. When something goes wrong they want someone to blame.
If you decide to go with something like Ruby on Rails you have to contend with the fact that management doesn’t understand open source (or trust it) and have never heard of 37Signals. So the blame falls to you for having gone with a small “experimental” company rather than a “trusted” one like Microsoft (and yes those words in quotes are actual quotes from my attempt at using such technology)
Where as when something goes wrong with Microsoft technology it’s written of as inevitable (that’s where the saying “no one ever got fired for using Microsoft” came from) It’s a sad reality but sometimes you can’t pick the best technical solutions. Sometimes the extra time it takes to use proprietary Microsoft technology is worth the political capital you save by going with Microsoft. That fact doesn’t make me happy but it’s true.
My first question after reading the title was "Why?" From the article: "JA: All the problems we had (licensing, testing, deployments) could have been overcome. We could have used workarounds, written our own deployment framework, etc. What is comes down to is that we both really enjoy working with Rails and we enjoy the Rails community and the tools and libraries available. One of the best parts about running the sho…
RC: Money.
I'm not an expert with the Microsoft stack, but aren't there ways to mitigate the costs? I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. What other costs are there specific to the Microsoft stack?
I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...
Windows Web Server: $400 SQL Server Express: Free (Databases have a 4 GB maximum size)
I can't image how it would cost them 5 figures to use asp.net mvc. I find the productivity of the MS development stack to be well worth the meager cost.
Take stackoverflow.com - a hugely successful site that I believe runs off 3 servers (originally 1). Jeff and Joel put this together on a pretty tight budget and I bet their site handles a bigger workload than the OP's site.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...
SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out). Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people. I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would've loved to see a rough breakdown of how they got the the "5 figures" cost...
This article is pretty short on costing details. Silverlight encoding aside (because that's competely unrelated to asp.net mvc deployment) you can deploy web sites really cheap on the microsoft stack. Windows Web Server: $400 SQL Server Express: Free (Databases have a 4 GB maximum size) I can't image how it would cost them 5 figures to use asp.net mvc. I find the productivity of the MS development stack to be well wo…
As an MS developer this really is devastating. Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked there (I'd call him the most high profile MS employee aside from Scott Guthrie). To have him come out and say he couldn't make a startup work with Microsoft technology really tells you all you need to know about that. I still need to use .Net at work but I think…
It has nothing to do with the technology - it's good stuff and we could have made it work fine. The issue is we want to stay small and not take on the associated cost. I can see how it might come off like I'm damning the platform - that was hardly my intention. Rails has had 3+ years of Open Source contribution to build out the platform and make it do amazing things - ASP.NET MVC will (hopefully) grow in some of the…
C# is a fine language, and ASP.Net MVC is a great framework, but I can't help but feel like the 'other kids' are ransacking the candy store while I'm out on the curb. In terms of testing frameworks and tools, the Ruby/Rails platform is lightyears ahead. I know there are attempts to bring some of the core concepts in RSpec and Cucumber to the .Net platform, but we're not there yet, and probably never will be. The goalposts are always shifting - the OSS platform can respond to change and new ideas much more quickly than the MS platform.
We have an MVC framework for web development now, but it has taken 10 years (Java Struts was released roughly around the same time as Webforms iirc)! Testing is only one element of this - in the OSS world we're also seeing an explosion of asynchronous queuing/messaging frameworks, object/document datastores, serverside js and other innovations.
I also share your frustration with the coupling of the framework releases to a new IDE. I use Vim for everything other than .Net development, and like the fact that the rug isn't going to be pulled out from under me every two years.
As a Microsoft developer it is hard not to feel envious of the OSS community. The Alt.Net community if anything appears to be shrinking, and it is presumably because those developers have come to a similar conclusion as yourself - the cost simply does not justify what the MS platform can offer.
I'm not an expert with the Microsoft stack, but aren't there ways to mitigate the costs? I've heard Mono supports (most of?) ASP.NET and you don't have to use SQL server either. What other costs are there specific to the Microsoft stack?
I wrote a medium-sized online game for a guy who wanted to do it in Mono/MySQL. True, Mono does implement a lot of ASP.NET, and a lot of things work fine, but there are still rough edges that drove us crazy to the point that I finally convinced him to switch over to a Windows server (from Linux/Apache). Some examples:
* Deployment: Mono was very touchy about deploying changes. If you drop in app_offline.htm and then replace every part of the site with new files, it usually worked. When it didn't, it would hang Apache and/or just start returning 500 errors until the web server was restarted. (Whereas with ASP.NET, you can drop in individual files and/or updated DLLs and the site will smoothly recompile as needed.) This was somewhat okay on dev, but got very old very fast in production.
* Strange memory errors: I'm still not sure what was going on, but we had some strange behavior going on where the application would get itself into states that should not have been possible. In one instance I was able to track it down to a particular variable assignment that simply would not happen, despite the code clearly being executed. (E.g., "int x = 42; x++; Trace.Write(x);" would write 42. More complex than that, but that type of thing.) My wild guess is some kind of memory allocation in Mono, but I don't know. Could have been my code somehow, but I have never seen the problem since switching to a Windows server.
* Feature lag: By its very nature, Mono lags behind .NET and it got old being able to use cool 3.5 features (such as LINQ) on other projects and be stuck with 2.0 in Mono.
I think Mono's an impressive project, and my hat's off to the folks to have worked so hard on it, but after some experience with it I decided that if I'm going to write stuff in C# I'm doing it on the Microsoft stack.