3 ms·

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 associate

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 same ways - but there's a somewhat stunted element to the .NET OSS ecosystem. Hopefully that will change.

jawngee 16y ago
That will never change because the surrounding ecosystem is expensive as shit. It's also very slow moving and wildly outdated.
SamAtt 16y ago
My point really was only part technical though. To give an example you had to switch from Silverlight for a completely nontechnical reason. It wasn't even expense related. But you still had to switch and it still cost you time and money you wouldn't need to spend had you just gone with Flash in the first place. So the point to me is still "don't use Microsoft technology because you'll end up needing to switch"
- robconery 16y ago
  Can't argue with that. Outside the corporate walls money is king - it's a hard truth and one I was not about to pay for personally :).
- kenjackson 16y ago
  But isn't that the case with virtually any technology? We've used C, C++, Java, C#, VB, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Flash, etc... We always look at the stack and make a business and technical decision about what to keep and what to toss.
squidsoup 16y ago
Rob, I've always enjoyed reading your posts as I've personally been straddling the gap between the two worlds (MS and OSS) for a long time now. Primarily this is due to our local job market - there simply aren't any OSS jobs where I live, and Microsoft is very deeply embedded in the New Zealand marketplace. 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.
- euroclydon 16y ago
  BDD on .NET? Check out the S#arp Architecture, it's designed to be the RoR of the .NET world, and it has some nice BDD tools, plus scaffolding for IoC, Unit Tests, Services, and MVC. http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net
  - robconery 16y ago
    SharpArchitecture, while swell and neat, doesn't scratch the itch of "this stuff really isn't that hard". There's a metric s* ton of concepts and code in there that are more suitable for a military defense system, let alone a startup.

jawngee 16y ago

That will never change because the surrounding ecosystem is expensive as shit. It's also very slow moving and wildly outdated.

SamAtt 16y ago

My point really was only part technical though. To give an example you had to switch from Silverlight for a completely nontechnical reason. It wasn't even expense related. But you still had to switch and it still cost you time and money you wouldn't need to spend had you just gone with Flash in the first place. So the point to me is still "don't use Microsoft technology because you'll end up needing to switch"

robconery 16y ago
Can't argue with that. Outside the corporate walls money is king - it's a hard truth and one I was not about to pay for personally :).
kenjackson 16y ago
But isn't that the case with virtually any technology? We've used C, C++, Java, C#, VB, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Flash, etc... We always look at the stack and make a business and technical decision about what to keep and what to toss.

squidsoup 16y ago

Rob, I've always enjoyed reading your posts as I've personally been straddling the gap between the two worlds (MS and OSS) for a long time now. Primarily this is due to our local job market - there simply aren't any OSS jobs where I live, and Microsoft is very deeply embedded in the New Zealand marketplace. 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.

euroclydon 16y ago
BDD on .NET? Check out the S#arp Architecture, it's designed to be the RoR of the .NET world, and it has some nice BDD tools, plus scaffolding for IoC, Unit Tests, Services, and MVC. http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net
- robconery 16y ago
  SharpArchitecture, while swell and neat, doesn't scratch the itch of "this stuff really isn't that hard". There's a metric s* ton of concepts and code in there that are more suitable for a military defense system, let alone a startup.