7 ms·

Building a Startup - Defending .NET

84 points by tansey 16y ago

latch 16y ago
Same as most other posts defending one technology choice versus others. It's what I know best...I like the tools...can't we all get along... The only interesting point is also the vaguest...The AI that's already available in .NET (and, by the way it's stated, apparently not in others). I also have to counterpoint that ASP.NET MVC is "conceptually" the same as Rails/Django. Conceptual similarities are pretty meaningless. My RC plane is conceptually similar to a fighter jet because it relies on the same four forces. Actual coding-wise, ASP.NET MVC is closer to WebForms than Rails.
- tansey 16y ago
  > Actual coding-wise, ASP.NET MVC is closer to WebForms than Rails. How so? I've never worked with WebForms, but I have done a few Rails projects. I don't see any real differences except for ActiveRecord, which does have a .NET port: http://www.castleproject.org/activerecord/ http://www.castleproject.org/activerecord/ Also, I wasn't trying to start a fight (really!). I just think that more .NET hackers should be motivated to do startups. IMHO, I think this is the year that .NET startups begin to take off. All the pieces are in place, it's just about motivating the community.
  - bdclimber14 16y ago
    I have several years of experience in ASP.net webforms, MVC, and Rails, and I also don't see the argument that webforms is closer to .net MVC than Rails. Sure, the syntax is more similar because both can be C#. I'm guessing this is what you mean, but the philosophy and architecture of MVC presents such a dramatic difference from webforms that I would argue it is strikingly different.
  - bdclimber14 16y ago
    I have no problem with .net, but what od you mean about "all the pieces are in place"?
    - tansey 16y ago
      I mean the barrier to entry has been lowered drastically. I used to do my projects in Rails because I didn't want to go through the hell of renting and setting up a server for ASP.NET. Also, MVC 3 has really flattened the learning curve and the expert community is finally putting together seriously good OSS and tutorials. Finally, MVC 3 development is also highly decoupled from a lot of the uglier MS attempts at making a totally proprietary stack (MS AJAX -> jQuery, Codeplex -> Github, Azure -> AppHarbor).
      - bdclimber14 16y ago
        It's certainly much better than a few years ago, and an order of magnitude improved over webforms. In some respects, I think the OSS ecosystem has much room to grow to catch up with Rails and Django. Although Rails and Django could also learn some tricks from Microsoft.
- vyrotek 16y ago
  I wish I could understand why you feel Asp.Net MVC is closer to WebForms than Rails. Unfortunately I have barely any Rails experience. But as a developer who did WebForms for years and made the switch to MVC, I will never go back. Edit - I also see you're the founder of badg.ly? I remember checking out your site not too long ago. We seem to be some-what in the same space with our startup http://www.IActionable.com http://www.IActionable.com. I'd love to learn more about how that's going for you.
- city41 16y ago
  > ASP.NET MVC is closer to WebForms than Rails. Could you please elaborate on this? I've written many websites in all three technologies and I don't see how standard ASP.NET is at all like ASP.NET MVC. Standard ASP.NET is a train wreck and a simply abysmal environment to be stuck in. People managed to make successful websites in spite of it, not because of it. ASP.NET MVC may be a bit behind the times and a total rip off of Rails and MonoRail, but it's one of the best things Microsoft has ever made.
  - latch 16y ago
    I guess I owe an explanation. Most significantly, much of the Rails magic comes from Ruby. So when you say the two (WebForms and ASP.NET MVC) aren't alike, its like you are forgetting that they both use C#. The DLR is a small step, but it isn't in the same league. We can disagree that Ruby is such a significant productivity boost over C# - that's fine. But, if you think language is completely irrelevant, then imagine an MVC framework like ASP.NET MVC where you had to code your HttpModules, HttpHandlers, controllers, models and data access code in C. Concrete example? You don't do DI in a Rails app...yet it permeates through any WebForms/MVC app you write. Then there's the tooling. WebForms and MVC share the same deployment and package management. Both are young and inferior to Cap and Gems (but they are young and they've done a good job with it so far). They are both hosted on IIS and essentially deployed/configured/managed the same. WebForms and MVC share the same IDE. Then there's community. ASP.NET MVC and WebForms generally have access to the same libraries (nUnit, NHibernate, JSON.NET), the same resources, and the same community leaders (hey, I was one of them!) So far, ASP.NET MVC and WebForms share: Language, Community, Tools, Libraries and deployment story. None of these are shared with Ruby. Let's talk about code. Neither ASP.NET MVC nor WebForms have a cohesive model/data access story. Microsoft doesn't really provide an "M" with ASP.NET MVC. You can pick DataSets (oh wait, we don't like that anymore), or Linq2Sql (oh wait, we don't like that anymore), or Entity Framework (lolz) or NHibernate. Or, you can use Castle's ActiveRecord. None of these are very similar to Rail's ActiveRecord. So, when it comes to modeling and persisting your data, WebForms and MVC are exactly the same - which happens to be quite different than Rails. WebForms and MVC share HttpHandlers and HttpModules/Global.asax. These are pretty nice (especially managed HttpHandlers in IIS 7). They also share the same built-in configuration management. But those are, yet again, something they share with each other, not with Rails. Controllers? Ya, ASP.NET MVC shares more in common here with Rails than it does with WebForm's page model. And I agree this is pretty substantial..but even under the covers, things aren't all the similar. Email sending is very different (in Rails it builds on top of the controller core, which is why I include it here). Routing, model binding, validation...ASP.NET MVC and Rails are more similar than ASP.NET MVC and WebForms...but they still aren't that similar. Views? ASP.NET MVC shares some stuff with Rails, but easily as much with WebForms. Asset management (or lack thereof), nested layouts... Honestly, the only thing the two share in common is a controller with actions. And, when you look at typical ASP.NET MVC code, controllers/actions tend to do a lot more than than an equivalent Rails actions. ASP.NET MVC shares more with Silverlight or WinForms development than it does with Rails. EDIT: Somehow in all that I forgot to mention that WinForms and MVC share the same framework (.NET) and runtime (DLR/CLR). Neither of which is anything like what Rails runs on.
latch 16y ago
When did hacker become a synonym for programmer?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- tansey 16y ago
  Fair enough. I changed the link to the "don't hire .NET programmers" article. I stand by the rest of the references, though. All the guys I mention in my last point are as much hackers as anyone I've ever met or worked with.
  - jschrf 16y ago
    Wow, that article is full of all sorts of stupid. Someone should tell the author that .NET is not a language (not that it'll make a difference). I find this part particularly hilarious: "However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t. There’s no button for it. The patties are pre-formed in the wrong size. They start out frozen so they can’t be smushed up and reformed, and the thawing machine is so tightly integrated with the cooking machine that there’s no way to intercept it between the two." Pure silliness. Perfect example of an irrational language bias.
    - bdclimber14 16y ago
      In the author's defense, it's not like he outlandishly says ".net is a language" -- it's fairly common to refer to the framework when discussing stacks because of specificity. Saying "I program Rails apps" is clear, and Ruby is assumed. Technically, I don't "program in Rails" is if it was a language, but since the knowledge needed to effectively work with a framework is so involved, it's worth stating.
    - Hominem 16y ago
      I had a lot of problems with that article as well. But I'd still like the give the author the benefit of the doubt. I assume he has very narrow experience with some framework like webforms or ran into some developers who did. With a lot of microsoft's frameworks it is easy to get stuck at a simple problem with no obvious solution, and conclude that there is no possible way to do it within that framework. Most of the time if you keep digging , you will find that there usually is a simple, elegant way to solve your problem but many people just give up, and decide that Microsoft just sucks.
vyrotek 16y ago
We've had our share of surprised faces when we told people our company is based on .Net as well. There were a lot of reasons for us to use the Microsoft stack. One of them was also existing expertise. My CoFounder and I previously worked as C# developers for years before working on IActionable.com full-time. And yes, Visual Studio is that awesome. "AppHarbor - It's Heroku for .NET. You simply can't beat it." I agree with most things in the article except for this. Its definitely my personal opinion, but I don't think AppHarbor is quite 'there' yet for a lot of companies. At least it wasn't for our company's specific needs. The .Net community is very unique and has very different expectations from other service providers. We typically eat what Microsoft feeds us and trust it. Microsoft is definitely putting a lot of weight behind Azure and it made sense for us to use their platform. I saw the level of support behind Azure first hand when our company was invited to Redmond to meet the dev teams as part of an early adopter program.
- tansey 16y ago
  > was invited to Redmond to meet the dev teams as part of an early adopter program. I think that's the problem I see with Azure. AppHarbor needs no early adopter program. It's great for the same reason that Heroku and Rails were great for people: if you want to get an MVP up and running, it's almost instantaneous. I want to focus on my core product first and delay thinking about seriously scaling and the other major benefits of Azure over AppHarbor.
  - vyrotek 16y ago
    In their defense, Azure's target is not startups or 'hackers' with a toy app. In fact, it makes no sense at all pricing-wise if you only run a single webserver and database. Their pricing covers a large and growing set of features. Microsoft's programs exist because of the insane amount of features and support that have to go into their products for their enterprise customers. And its those features that really make us stick with Azure for now. Specifically, I'm talking about TableStorage, Queues and AppFabric's Distributed Cache Service. I've already had a small chat with the AppHarbor guys before. I'd definitely love to move if it made sense. Don't get me wrong though. I definitely have my gripes with Azure too.
jschrf 16y ago
.NET is great. It's fast, clean, and the framework libs are incredibly good. C#, IronPython, and F# are amazing. I still haven't found an IDE that compares to VS in terms of productivity and usability. Despite all the things going for it, it's decidely un-trendy and people hate on it. I'm guessing it's primarily because it's from Microsoft. Software trends are silly.
- bdclimber14 16y ago
  When I switched from .net MVC to Rails after a few years with Microsoft, my biggest pain was from missing VS. Rock solid variable renaming, autocompletion and method look up saved so much time.
  - jschrf 16y ago
    I use Eclipse a lot, as well as a sprinkling of other IDEs. I tend miss autocompletion too (support for generics and polymorphism? yes please) but the thing I tend to miss the most is the debugger. Nothing else even comes close.
    - bdclimber14 16y ago
      Well, I don't agree about polymorphism (but that's a whole different conversation) :) I forgot about the integrated debugger though. I sure do miss variable inspection without littering code with puts.
- charlieflowers 16y ago
  It's true. .NET, and C# especially, is one of the few things Microsoft really got right. Anders H is a genius -- he showed it when he did Turbo Pascal, he showed it with Delphi, and he continues to show it with every new release of C#. Did you know that C# has: lambdas, closures, optional duck typing, first-class functions, better generics than Java, and type inference that is sometimes spooky? Really, the only flaw I see in C# (and clearly this is my own subjective opinion) is that I now believe dynamically (duck) typed languages are so much more empowering than strongly typed ones. To me, it seems you can get so much more done, faster, and you choose where to expend your energy to get "automated correctness". But even there, C# has the new "dynamic" keyword that allows for duck typing, so it is moving in the right direction.
nickbp 16y ago
As far as I can tell the author's reasons for deciding to use C# can be summed up as "I'm used to it from previous work, and some useful libraries related to my project are available." Those are perfectly valid reasons, but they aren't really much use to anyone who doesn't share those circumstances, and don't really have anything to do with upsides and downsides of the language itself. That would have been far more relevant to us outsiders. Also, "I'm buying a MBP" translates to "I'm serious about startups"? Who says image isn't everything? Besides, everyone knows serious hackers use IBM-era Thinkpads!
- tansey 16y ago
  > Also, "I'm buying a MBP" translates to "I'm serious about startups"? Well, that was tongue in cheek. But really, just the opposite-- I'm saying that I'm a total tool who's caved in to the trendy peer pressure of the startup culture. That culture shuns .NET on principal and there's lots of pressure to never use it for a startup. And if you don't believe there's peer pressure to use a MBP, try going to Red Rock or the Dojo with an Acer laptop. You can just feel people judging you. ;)
  - mindcrime 16y ago
    And if you don't believe there's peer pressure to use a MBP, try going to Red Rock or the Dojo with an Acer laptop. You can just feel people judging you. And? Unless you're trying to sell them something, who gives a rats-ass what they think? :-)
    - tansey 16y ago
      Again, tongue in cheek. :) Though I am really buying a MBP tomorrow. I'm doing it because I need a new laptop and I like the new MBP-- but you can be sure I'll have it setup to do Windows 7 in dual boot from day 1.
      - mindcrime 16y ago
        but you can be sure I'll have it setup to do Windows 7 Eeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwww..... boo, hiss. Windows?!?? Sorry, when you mentioned a PC based laptop, I assumed it would have been running Linux (or BSD or Plan9 or Minix or some other proper operating system.) :-)
wriq 16y ago
Existing expertise If the goal is to get to a minimum viable product quickly (like most startups) then existing knowledge is a pretty good reason to go with a certain stack. He even mentions having the main algorithm already implemented in C# so at that point it's pretty much no contest. He can always go the route similar to StackExchange in using Linux & Open Source on utility servers (Caching/Load Balancing) and keeping the MS-centric App/Database server.
- latch 16y ago
  How far do you take it though? What if someone knows c+cgi? I forget the exact quote, but something along the lines of 30 years experience doesn't mean much if it's the same year 30 times.
  - NetMonkey 16y ago
    Everything in life is a trade-off. And the 30 x 1 years quote nicely illustrates why you should always strive to learn new things. However, if you already know how to do something well in one particular stack, then you should just stick with that if the objective is to ship. The operative word is of course that you know you can do it well in that stack. If you start thinking "there has to be a better way" then you should seriously look into alternative stacks or whether you are using your current one correctly.
  - Chris_Newton 16y ago
    > 30 years experience doesn't mean much if it's the same year 30 times. Your quote is apt, but it cuts both ways. Using the same old tool indefinitely, even when newer tools can do the job better and much faster, might be foolish. On the other hand, learning to do the same task over and over again using different tools, each only a modest improvement on the last, might also be foolish. In the case of your C+CGI example, I would agree that it makes sense to prefer any of the more modern "scripting" languages, which typically have both good library support for networking protocols and much more powerful integrated string handling than C. On the other hand, there is little offered by any mainstream language ecosystem today that can't be achieved at least reasonably proficiently using tools from the .Net world as well (ignoring the obvious limitation of having to run on a .Net platform).
denysonique 16y ago
ASP.net MVC is maybe quite similar to Rails (it actually is 'inspired by it' i.e. a rip off). But the difference between .NET and Ruby is that Ruby has a culture of hackers, and most of the innovative things re web dev are born in Ruby e.g. Haml, Capistrano etc,and then get ported to other langs e.g. { :Haml => 'PHaml', :Rails => ['many PHP frameworks', 'ASP.net MVC'], :Capistrano => 'Fabric' }
- mgutz 16y ago
  As a long time .NET developer converted to Ruby and Node.js, you hit the nail on the head. The innovators and creative types are on the open source side. That is not to say I have not worked with talented .NET developers but for the most part the culture of .NET developers is to find a corporate job and wallow in an enterprise process. Don't do anything outside of Visual Studio and heaven forbid use anything not built by MS. The same can be said about Java which needs to be redefined in the dictionary as THE language of over-engineering.
Hominem 16y ago
I see some of the .net hate starting to seep into the corporate world as well. I work as a .net developer for a very large corporation and there is more and more talk of re-implementing production applications in Python. The perceived problem is poor code quality. It is an uphill battle to convince people that this problem is not going to be fixed by switching to Ruby if we continue to produce code by lowest bid. I think there is a difference in .net developers and Ruby or Python developers. There is a much higher demand for .net developers so many people who had some aptitude for computers picked it up to get a job. Seems to me, people who went through the effort and sought out Ruby or Python take extra pride in the craft of programming. I would say there are just as many .net developers who care about the code they produce, but they are background noise in the sea of mediocre talents. The prospect of finding them in that sea is pretty daunting.
- tansey 16y ago
  If both of those are true, then doesn't that mean a whole wave of sub-par Ruby and Python developers are coming our way in the next few years?
  - Hominem 16y ago
    Yes, I'm pretty sure I will see the staffing firms send me back the same developers, but now they will be Ruby experts. Maybe this is less about .net/other languages and more about what makes development so terrible in large corporations. But keep in mind most .net developers, of which I am one, are products or large corporate development .
  - plastics 16y ago
    I can't talk for Python, but from my limited experience the Ruby community started to get the submerged in a wave of sub-par developers when Obie Fernandez et al. started to promote the meme, that attending a Ruby/Rails related conference puts you in the top 5% bracket of software developers.
- fkcek 16y ago
  This is what pg called "The Python Paradox" http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html
_debug_ 16y ago
I do not even see the need for justification : After LINQ and Rx and the maturing of Mono, .NET is now far ahead of the Java ecosystem, even including Scala 2.9, in terms of developer productivity. The only reason I am having to learn Scala is that I am already quite familiar with the Java ecosystem (having used it at work for many years before I started doing something on my own) and do not wish to start from scratch in the .NET world.
- plastics 16y ago
  I am also quite familiar with the Java (and Ruby and pre iPhone Objective-C) ecosystem and invested quite a lot time in getting proficient with Scala since 2007 but recently got hooked on F#. My experience has been, that the available documentation on .Net (and F#) is so much better compared to the other stacks I know, that after three months or so of dabbling in my free time with .Net I already feel like having a much more solid base in .Net than the other platforms (where I have 4, 3 and 6 years experience). Granted this might be due to me either suck at Java, Ruby and Objective-C or me not yet having real world experience with .Net and being oblivious to ugly corner cases, warts etc. you only come across on a big real world project. But honestly my first contact with some of the books and online resources available for the .Net ecosystem and comparing that with what I was accustomed to was shocking.
callumjones 16y ago
I don't think many people actually dislike the .Net family but it's more the parent company of .Net that causes a lot of dislike to filter down onto ASP.Net and C#. I have this weird twisted hatred with Microsoft. I think .Net is great but as an iOS dev working inside a Microsoft based team I've founded solutions such as TFS to be just terrible lock ins. I'd probably love Microsoft more if just this once they would of assessed the current source control versions, chosen a popular standard (Git) and then deeply integrated it into VS. What they instead did was give you TFS with a lack of client end Rest API documentation and wrote a terrible cross platform command line tool. You didn't see Apple creating XSourceControl.
- StrawberryFrog 16y ago
  a Microsoft based team I've founded solutions such as TFS to be just terrible lock ins. The majority of .net development that I have seen is not done on TFS. I've used many source control sustems for .Net code. SVN is far more common. a ".Net dev shop" is far from being the same thing as "a Microsoft only" shop. Typically you see software in use like NUnut, SVN, jQuery, Castle Windsor, TeamCity, Resharper, etc. If you're lucky, you may even get Git or Mercurual. MS could not have standardised on Git even if they'd wanted to - TFS pre-dates Git by a few years. The driver for MS making TFS was two-fold: 1) get people off MS's previous source control system, SourceSafe, which dates back to about 1995. And it shows. SourceSafe is one of the few version control systems that I do not hesitate to say "avoid! Run! Use anything else!" about. TFS is actually a large improvement. 2) To try to prevent them from going to SVN instead, which was the new thing then. Since SVN is lightweight and free, so TFS took the opposite route of being heavyweight, kitchen-sink, ALM, etc.
afsina 16y ago
I object the "VS" is the best IDE statement. For C#, maybe that is true. But I used Intellij IDEA and VS. VS still looks like glorified notepad against IDEA. I think most developers are living under their language bubble. Also, unlike ruby-python, C# and Java are IDE languages. You cannot program without one.
- martinp 16y ago
  So very true, IntelliJ IDEA is miles ahead of any other IDE I've ever used (including VS). For Java development, I started out with NetBeans, then switched to Eclipse and finally to IntelliJ. Recentely JetBrains has also released IDEs for Ruby/Rails (RubyMine) and Python/Django (PyCharm). It will be interesting to see if they gain any momentum within their respective communties.
- rodh257 16y ago
  Have you used Resharper with Visual Studio? Made by Jetbrains who make Intellij, it brings a lot of the same refactorings and other features across. No serious .NET developer should be without it, though Visual Studio 2010 has added a lot of new features that previously were only available through Resharper.
fmavituna 16y ago
"Can't we all just get along?" Beauty of it, you don't need to get along with anyone. People will remember your product not your technology stack.
sajidnizami 16y ago
I don't think this should even be a discussion. If it covers costs well and your solutions work, discussing this doesn't matter. I started with using .Net for a startup four years ago. Back then there were no Redis, NoSQL wasn't even a invented as a term, cloud servers were just a concept and scaling wasn't anybody's primary concern. In four years the only optimizations I ever did were done via SQL Server profiling or just by modifying a bit of code. I pretty much learnt .Net during this time and the sites I work for get pretty hammered at their peak times and handle well. So yes from experience .Net is a good starting point. If you know the internals you can probably write and architect code that scales well too without falling back on NoSQL services. You won't need to go looking for complicated PHP cache solutions etc, you won't need to get in the trouble of selecting complicated frameworks. The whole setup gives you ease of mind. No arguments against LAMP or other environments. Just that I always found .Net to be easier to work with!
jasonkester 16y ago
I think it's safe to say that .NET doesn't need defending. People who use it tend to continue using it whenever they have a choice in the matter, and quietly get good results from it every time. It doesn't need defense because it's not being attacked. It's not being attacked because it just plain works. Granted it's a bit boring, but really that's one of its advantages.
thespace 16y ago
Ex .net dev here, keep learning python brother, the promised land is close!
chopsueyar 16y ago
Do you need help picking up all those names you dropped?
synnik 16y ago
The problem with the Microsoft stack is not technical -- it is financial. Why pay M$ license fees when other platforms are free? Especially as you scale?
- johns 16y ago
  Please grow up and stop using 'M$'. It's not cool or clever anymore (if it ever was) and it undermines any good points you might be making.
  - synnik 16y ago
    Noted. Consider my point undermined.

84 points by tansey 16y ago

latch 16y ago

Same as most other posts defending one technology choice versus others. It's what I know best...I like the tools...can't we all get along... The only interesting point is also the vaguest...The AI that's already available in .NET (and, by the way it's stated, apparently not in others). I also have to counterpoint that ASP.NET MVC is "conceptually" the same as Rails/Django. Conceptual similarities are pretty meaningless. My RC plane is conceptually similar to a fighter jet because it relies on the same four forces. Actual coding-wise, ASP.NET MVC is closer to WebForms than Rails.

tansey 16y ago
> Actual coding-wise, ASP.NET MVC is closer to WebForms than Rails. How so? I've never worked with WebForms, but I have done a few Rails projects. I don't see any real differences except for ActiveRecord, which does have a .NET port: http://www.castleproject.org/activerecord/ http://www.castleproject.org/activerecord/ Also, I wasn't trying to start a fight (really!). I just think that more .NET hackers should be motivated to do startups. IMHO, I think this is the year that .NET startups begin to take off. All the pieces are in place, it's just about motivating the community.
- bdclimber14 16y ago
  I have several years of experience in ASP.net webforms, MVC, and Rails, and I also don't see the argument that webforms is closer to .net MVC than Rails. Sure, the syntax is more similar because both can be C#. I'm guessing this is what you mean, but the philosophy and architecture of MVC presents such a dramatic difference from webforms that I would argue it is strikingly different.
- bdclimber14 16y ago
  I have no problem with .net, but what od you mean about "all the pieces are in place"?
  - tansey 16y ago
    I mean the barrier to entry has been lowered drastically. I used to do my projects in Rails because I didn't want to go through the hell of renting and setting up a server for ASP.NET. Also, MVC 3 has really flattened the learning curve and the expert community is finally putting together seriously good OSS and tutorials. Finally, MVC 3 development is also highly decoupled from a lot of the uglier MS attempts at making a totally proprietary stack (MS AJAX -> jQuery, Codeplex -> Github, Azure -> AppHarbor).
    - bdclimber14 16y ago
      It's certainly much better than a few years ago, and an order of magnitude improved over webforms. In some respects, I think the OSS ecosystem has much room to grow to catch up with Rails and Django. Although Rails and Django could also learn some tricks from Microsoft.
vyrotek 16y ago
I wish I could understand why you feel Asp.Net MVC is closer to WebForms than Rails. Unfortunately I have barely any Rails experience. But as a developer who did WebForms for years and made the switch to MVC, I will never go back. Edit - I also see you're the founder of badg.ly? I remember checking out your site not too long ago. We seem to be some-what in the same space with our startup http://www.IActionable.com http://www.IActionable.com. I'd love to learn more about how that's going for you.
city41 16y ago
> ASP.NET MVC is closer to WebForms than Rails. Could you please elaborate on this? I've written many websites in all three technologies and I don't see how standard ASP.NET is at all like ASP.NET MVC. Standard ASP.NET is a train wreck and a simply abysmal environment to be stuck in. People managed to make successful websites in spite of it, not because of it. ASP.NET MVC may be a bit behind the times and a total rip off of Rails and MonoRail, but it's one of the best things Microsoft has ever made.
- latch 16y ago
  I guess I owe an explanation. Most significantly, much of the Rails magic comes from Ruby. So when you say the two (WebForms and ASP.NET MVC) aren't alike, its like you are forgetting that they both use C#. The DLR is a small step, but it isn't in the same league. We can disagree that Ruby is such a significant productivity boost over C# - that's fine. But, if you think language is completely irrelevant, then imagine an MVC framework like ASP.NET MVC where you had to code your HttpModules, HttpHandlers, controllers, models and data access code in C. Concrete example? You don't do DI in a Rails app...yet it permeates through any WebForms/MVC app you write. Then there's the tooling. WebForms and MVC share the same deployment and package management. Both are young and inferior to Cap and Gems (but they are young and they've done a good job with it so far). They are both hosted on IIS and essentially deployed/configured/managed the same. WebForms and MVC share the same IDE. Then there's community. ASP.NET MVC and WebForms generally have access to the same libraries (nUnit, NHibernate, JSON.NET), the same resources, and the same community leaders (hey, I was one of them!) So far, ASP.NET MVC and WebForms share: Language, Community, Tools, Libraries and deployment story. None of these are shared with Ruby. Let's talk about code. Neither ASP.NET MVC nor WebForms have a cohesive model/data access story. Microsoft doesn't really provide an "M" with ASP.NET MVC. You can pick DataSets (oh wait, we don't like that anymore), or Linq2Sql (oh wait, we don't like that anymore), or Entity Framework (lolz) or NHibernate. Or, you can use Castle's ActiveRecord. None of these are very similar to Rail's ActiveRecord. So, when it comes to modeling and persisting your data, WebForms and MVC are exactly the same - which happens to be quite different than Rails. WebForms and MVC share HttpHandlers and HttpModules/Global.asax. These are pretty nice (especially managed HttpHandlers in IIS 7). They also share the same built-in configuration management. But those are, yet again, something they share with each other, not with Rails. Controllers? Ya, ASP.NET MVC shares more in common here with Rails than it does with WebForm's page model. And I agree this is pretty substantial..but even under the covers, things aren't all the similar. Email sending is very different (in Rails it builds on top of the controller core, which is why I include it here). Routing, model binding, validation...ASP.NET MVC and Rails are more similar than ASP.NET MVC and WebForms...but they still aren't that similar. Views? ASP.NET MVC shares some stuff with Rails, but easily as much with WebForms. Asset management (or lack thereof), nested layouts... Honestly, the only thing the two share in common is a controller with actions. And, when you look at typical ASP.NET MVC code, controllers/actions tend to do a lot more than than an equivalent Rails actions. ASP.NET MVC shares more with Silverlight or WinForms development than it does with Rails. EDIT: Somehow in all that I forgot to mention that WinForms and MVC share the same framework (.NET) and runtime (DLR/CLR). Neither of which is anything like what Rails runs on.

latch 16y ago

When did hacker become a synonym for programmer?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
tansey 16y ago
Fair enough. I changed the link to the "don't hire .NET programmers" article. I stand by the rest of the references, though. All the guys I mention in my last point are as much hackers as anyone I've ever met or worked with.
- jschrf 16y ago
  Wow, that article is full of all sorts of stupid. Someone should tell the author that .NET is not a language (not that it'll make a difference). I find this part particularly hilarious: "However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t. There’s no button for it. The patties are pre-formed in the wrong size. They start out frozen so they can’t be smushed up and reformed, and the thawing machine is so tightly integrated with the cooking machine that there’s no way to intercept it between the two." Pure silliness. Perfect example of an irrational language bias.
  - bdclimber14 16y ago
    In the author's defense, it's not like he outlandishly says ".net is a language" -- it's fairly common to refer to the framework when discussing stacks because of specificity. Saying "I program Rails apps" is clear, and Ruby is assumed. Technically, I don't "program in Rails" is if it was a language, but since the knowledge needed to effectively work with a framework is so involved, it's worth stating.
  - Hominem 16y ago
    I had a lot of problems with that article as well. But I'd still like the give the author the benefit of the doubt. I assume he has very narrow experience with some framework like webforms or ran into some developers who did. With a lot of microsoft's frameworks it is easy to get stuck at a simple problem with no obvious solution, and conclude that there is no possible way to do it within that framework. Most of the time if you keep digging , you will find that there usually is a simple, elegant way to solve your problem but many people just give up, and decide that Microsoft just sucks.

vyrotek 16y ago

We've had our share of surprised faces when we told people our company is based on .Net as well. There were a lot of reasons for us to use the Microsoft stack. One of them was also existing expertise. My CoFounder and I previously worked as C# developers for years before working on IActionable.com full-time. And yes, Visual Studio is that awesome. "AppHarbor - It's Heroku for .NET. You simply can't beat it." I agree with most things in the article except for this. Its definitely my personal opinion, but I don't think AppHarbor is quite 'there' yet for a lot of companies. At least it wasn't for our company's specific needs. The .Net community is very unique and has very different expectations from other service providers. We typically eat what Microsoft feeds us and trust it. Microsoft is definitely putting a lot of weight behind Azure and it made sense for us to use their platform. I saw the level of support behind Azure first hand when our company was invited to Redmond to meet the dev teams as part of an early adopter program.

tansey 16y ago
> was invited to Redmond to meet the dev teams as part of an early adopter program. I think that's the problem I see with Azure. AppHarbor needs no early adopter program. It's great for the same reason that Heroku and Rails were great for people: if you want to get an MVP up and running, it's almost instantaneous. I want to focus on my core product first and delay thinking about seriously scaling and the other major benefits of Azure over AppHarbor.
- vyrotek 16y ago
  In their defense, Azure's target is not startups or 'hackers' with a toy app. In fact, it makes no sense at all pricing-wise if you only run a single webserver and database. Their pricing covers a large and growing set of features. Microsoft's programs exist because of the insane amount of features and support that have to go into their products for their enterprise customers. And its those features that really make us stick with Azure for now. Specifically, I'm talking about TableStorage, Queues and AppFabric's Distributed Cache Service. I've already had a small chat with the AppHarbor guys before. I'd definitely love to move if it made sense. Don't get me wrong though. I definitely have my gripes with Azure too.

jschrf 16y ago

.NET is great. It's fast, clean, and the framework libs are incredibly good. C#, IronPython, and F# are amazing. I still haven't found an IDE that compares to VS in terms of productivity and usability. Despite all the things going for it, it's decidely un-trendy and people hate on it. I'm guessing it's primarily because it's from Microsoft. Software trends are silly.

bdclimber14 16y ago
When I switched from .net MVC to Rails after a few years with Microsoft, my biggest pain was from missing VS. Rock solid variable renaming, autocompletion and method look up saved so much time.
- jschrf 16y ago
  I use Eclipse a lot, as well as a sprinkling of other IDEs. I tend miss autocompletion too (support for generics and polymorphism? yes please) but the thing I tend to miss the most is the debugger. Nothing else even comes close.
  - bdclimber14 16y ago
    Well, I don't agree about polymorphism (but that's a whole different conversation) :) I forgot about the integrated debugger though. I sure do miss variable inspection without littering code with puts.
charlieflowers 16y ago
It's true. .NET, and C# especially, is one of the few things Microsoft really got right. Anders H is a genius -- he showed it when he did Turbo Pascal, he showed it with Delphi, and he continues to show it with every new release of C#. Did you know that C# has: lambdas, closures, optional duck typing, first-class functions, better generics than Java, and type inference that is sometimes spooky? Really, the only flaw I see in C# (and clearly this is my own subjective opinion) is that I now believe dynamically (duck) typed languages are so much more empowering than strongly typed ones. To me, it seems you can get so much more done, faster, and you choose where to expend your energy to get "automated correctness". But even there, C# has the new "dynamic" keyword that allows for duck typing, so it is moving in the right direction.

nickbp 16y ago

As far as I can tell the author's reasons for deciding to use C# can be summed up as "I'm used to it from previous work, and some useful libraries related to my project are available." Those are perfectly valid reasons, but they aren't really much use to anyone who doesn't share those circumstances, and don't really have anything to do with upsides and downsides of the language itself. That would have been far more relevant to us outsiders. Also, "I'm buying a MBP" translates to "I'm serious about startups"? Who says image isn't everything? Besides, everyone knows serious hackers use IBM-era Thinkpads!

tansey 16y ago
> Also, "I'm buying a MBP" translates to "I'm serious about startups"? Well, that was tongue in cheek. But really, just the opposite-- I'm saying that I'm a total tool who's caved in to the trendy peer pressure of the startup culture. That culture shuns .NET on principal and there's lots of pressure to never use it for a startup. And if you don't believe there's peer pressure to use a MBP, try going to Red Rock or the Dojo with an Acer laptop. You can just feel people judging you. ;)
- mindcrime 16y ago
  And if you don't believe there's peer pressure to use a MBP, try going to Red Rock or the Dojo with an Acer laptop. You can just feel people judging you. And? Unless you're trying to sell them something, who gives a rats-ass what they think? :-)
  - tansey 16y ago
    Again, tongue in cheek. :) Though I am really buying a MBP tomorrow. I'm doing it because I need a new laptop and I like the new MBP-- but you can be sure I'll have it setup to do Windows 7 in dual boot from day 1.
    - mindcrime 16y ago
      but you can be sure I'll have it setup to do Windows 7 Eeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwww..... boo, hiss. Windows?!?? Sorry, when you mentioned a PC based laptop, I assumed it would have been running Linux (or BSD or Plan9 or Minix or some other proper operating system.) :-)

wriq 16y ago

Existing expertise If the goal is to get to a minimum viable product quickly (like most startups) then existing knowledge is a pretty good reason to go with a certain stack. He even mentions having the main algorithm already implemented in C# so at that point it's pretty much no contest. He can always go the route similar to StackExchange in using Linux & Open Source on utility servers (Caching/Load Balancing) and keeping the MS-centric App/Database server.

latch 16y ago
How far do you take it though? What if someone knows c+cgi? I forget the exact quote, but something along the lines of 30 years experience doesn't mean much if it's the same year 30 times.
- NetMonkey 16y ago
  Everything in life is a trade-off. And the 30 x 1 years quote nicely illustrates why you should always strive to learn new things. However, if you already know how to do something well in one particular stack, then you should just stick with that if the objective is to ship. The operative word is of course that you know you can do it well in that stack. If you start thinking "there has to be a better way" then you should seriously look into alternative stacks or whether you are using your current one correctly.
- Chris_Newton 16y ago
  > 30 years experience doesn't mean much if it's the same year 30 times. Your quote is apt, but it cuts both ways. Using the same old tool indefinitely, even when newer tools can do the job better and much faster, might be foolish. On the other hand, learning to do the same task over and over again using different tools, each only a modest improvement on the last, might also be foolish. In the case of your C+CGI example, I would agree that it makes sense to prefer any of the more modern "scripting" languages, which typically have both good library support for networking protocols and much more powerful integrated string handling than C. On the other hand, there is little offered by any mainstream language ecosystem today that can't be achieved at least reasonably proficiently using tools from the .Net world as well (ignoring the obvious limitation of having to run on a .Net platform).

denysonique 16y ago

ASP.net MVC is maybe quite similar to Rails (it actually is 'inspired by it' i.e. a rip off). But the difference between .NET and Ruby is that Ruby has a culture of hackers, and most of the innovative things re web dev are born in Ruby e.g. Haml, Capistrano etc,and then get ported to other langs e.g. { :Haml => 'PHaml', :Rails => ['many PHP frameworks', 'ASP.net MVC'], :Capistrano => 'Fabric' }

mgutz 16y ago
As a long time .NET developer converted to Ruby and Node.js, you hit the nail on the head. The innovators and creative types are on the open source side. That is not to say I have not worked with talented .NET developers but for the most part the culture of .NET developers is to find a corporate job and wallow in an enterprise process. Don't do anything outside of Visual Studio and heaven forbid use anything not built by MS. The same can be said about Java which needs to be redefined in the dictionary as THE language of over-engineering.

Hominem 16y ago

I see some of the .net hate starting to seep into the corporate world as well. I work as a .net developer for a very large corporation and there is more and more talk of re-implementing production applications in Python. The perceived problem is poor code quality. It is an uphill battle to convince people that this problem is not going to be fixed by switching to Ruby if we continue to produce code by lowest bid. I think there is a difference in .net developers and Ruby or Python developers. There is a much higher demand for .net developers so many people who had some aptitude for computers picked it up to get a job. Seems to me, people who went through the effort and sought out Ruby or Python take extra pride in the craft of programming. I would say there are just as many .net developers who care about the code they produce, but they are background noise in the sea of mediocre talents. The prospect of finding them in that sea is pretty daunting.

tansey 16y ago
If both of those are true, then doesn't that mean a whole wave of sub-par Ruby and Python developers are coming our way in the next few years?
- Hominem 16y ago
  Yes, I'm pretty sure I will see the staffing firms send me back the same developers, but now they will be Ruby experts. Maybe this is less about .net/other languages and more about what makes development so terrible in large corporations. But keep in mind most .net developers, of which I am one, are products or large corporate development .
- plastics 16y ago
  I can't talk for Python, but from my limited experience the Ruby community started to get the submerged in a wave of sub-par developers when Obie Fernandez et al. started to promote the meme, that attending a Ruby/Rails related conference puts you in the top 5% bracket of software developers.
fkcek 16y ago
This is what pg called "The Python Paradox" http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

_debug_ 16y ago

I do not even see the need for justification : After LINQ and Rx and the maturing of Mono, .NET is now far ahead of the Java ecosystem, even including Scala 2.9, in terms of developer productivity. The only reason I am having to learn Scala is that I am already quite familiar with the Java ecosystem (having used it at work for many years before I started doing something on my own) and do not wish to start from scratch in the .NET world.

plastics 16y ago
I am also quite familiar with the Java (and Ruby and pre iPhone Objective-C) ecosystem and invested quite a lot time in getting proficient with Scala since 2007 but recently got hooked on F#. My experience has been, that the available documentation on .Net (and F#) is so much better compared to the other stacks I know, that after three months or so of dabbling in my free time with .Net I already feel like having a much more solid base in .Net than the other platforms (where I have 4, 3 and 6 years experience). Granted this might be due to me either suck at Java, Ruby and Objective-C or me not yet having real world experience with .Net and being oblivious to ugly corner cases, warts etc. you only come across on a big real world project. But honestly my first contact with some of the books and online resources available for the .Net ecosystem and comparing that with what I was accustomed to was shocking.

callumjones 16y ago

I don't think many people actually dislike the .Net family but it's more the parent company of .Net that causes a lot of dislike to filter down onto ASP.Net and C#. I have this weird twisted hatred with Microsoft. I think .Net is great but as an iOS dev working inside a Microsoft based team I've founded solutions such as TFS to be just terrible lock ins. I'd probably love Microsoft more if just this once they would of assessed the current source control versions, chosen a popular standard (Git) and then deeply integrated it into VS. What they instead did was give you TFS with a lack of client end Rest API documentation and wrote a terrible cross platform command line tool. You didn't see Apple creating XSourceControl.

StrawberryFrog 16y ago
a Microsoft based team I've founded solutions such as TFS to be just terrible lock ins. The majority of .net development that I have seen is not done on TFS. I've used many source control sustems for .Net code. SVN is far more common. a ".Net dev shop" is far from being the same thing as "a Microsoft only" shop. Typically you see software in use like NUnut, SVN, jQuery, Castle Windsor, TeamCity, Resharper, etc. If you're lucky, you may even get Git or Mercurual. MS could not have standardised on Git even if they'd wanted to - TFS pre-dates Git by a few years. The driver for MS making TFS was two-fold: 1) get people off MS's previous source control system, SourceSafe, which dates back to about 1995. And it shows. SourceSafe is one of the few version control systems that I do not hesitate to say "avoid! Run! Use anything else!" about. TFS is actually a large improvement. 2) To try to prevent them from going to SVN instead, which was the new thing then. Since SVN is lightweight and free, so TFS took the opposite route of being heavyweight, kitchen-sink, ALM, etc.

afsina 16y ago

I object the "VS" is the best IDE statement. For C#, maybe that is true. But I used Intellij IDEA and VS. VS still looks like glorified notepad against IDEA. I think most developers are living under their language bubble. Also, unlike ruby-python, C# and Java are IDE languages. You cannot program without one.

martinp 16y ago
So very true, IntelliJ IDEA is miles ahead of any other IDE I've ever used (including VS). For Java development, I started out with NetBeans, then switched to Eclipse and finally to IntelliJ. Recentely JetBrains has also released IDEs for Ruby/Rails (RubyMine) and Python/Django (PyCharm). It will be interesting to see if they gain any momentum within their respective communties.
rodh257 16y ago
Have you used Resharper with Visual Studio? Made by Jetbrains who make Intellij, it brings a lot of the same refactorings and other features across. No serious .NET developer should be without it, though Visual Studio 2010 has added a lot of new features that previously were only available through Resharper.

fmavituna 16y ago

"Can't we all just get along?" Beauty of it, you don't need to get along with anyone. People will remember your product not your technology stack.

sajidnizami 16y ago

I don't think this should even be a discussion. If it covers costs well and your solutions work, discussing this doesn't matter. I started with using .Net for a startup four years ago. Back then there were no Redis, NoSQL wasn't even a invented as a term, cloud servers were just a concept and scaling wasn't anybody's primary concern. In four years the only optimizations I ever did were done via SQL Server profiling or just by modifying a bit of code. I pretty much learnt .Net during this time and the sites I work for get pretty hammered at their peak times and handle well. So yes from experience .Net is a good starting point. If you know the internals you can probably write and architect code that scales well too without falling back on NoSQL services. You won't need to go looking for complicated PHP cache solutions etc, you won't need to get in the trouble of selecting complicated frameworks. The whole setup gives you ease of mind. No arguments against LAMP or other environments. Just that I always found .Net to be easier to work with!

jasonkester 16y ago

I think it's safe to say that .NET doesn't need defending. People who use it tend to continue using it whenever they have a choice in the matter, and quietly get good results from it every time. It doesn't need defense because it's not being attacked. It's not being attacked because it just plain works. Granted it's a bit boring, but really that's one of its advantages.

thespace 16y ago

Ex .net dev here, keep learning python brother, the promised land is close!

chopsueyar 16y ago

Do you need help picking up all those names you dropped?

synnik 16y ago

The problem with the Microsoft stack is not technical -- it is financial. Why pay M$ license fees when other platforms are free? Especially as you scale?

johns 16y ago
Please grow up and stop using 'M$'. It's not cool or clever anymore (if it ever was) and it undermines any good points you might be making.
- synnik 16y ago
  Noted. Consider my point undermined.