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I still don’t understand why more startups don’t adopt .NET. It’s such a powerful technology. ASP.NET has some of the best performance benchmarks out there, C#

I still don’t understand why more startups don’t adopt .NET. It’s such a powerful technology. ASP.NET has some of the best performance benchmarks out there, C# is a rich and expressive language, and the ecosystem along with the standard libraries are stable and mature. You rarely run into the kind of headaches you often see with more “trendy” stacks. In many cases, the bias comes down to perception — .NET is seen as “enterprise” or “legacy,” while in reality it’s open-source, cross-platform, and very well-supported by Microsoft and the community. For a startup that needs stability and performance without reinventing the wheel, .NET can be a huge win.

bigonlogn 1y ago
Also, you can achieve some pretty fast development velocity with .NET. C# is intuitive and the tools are great. I know everyone complains about Visual Studio, but even it's most vocal complainers will admit it sets the industry standard for debugging. One sticking point is that the tools, while community and small projects, are all behind a license. But, they are free for small teams making under something like $1M/year in revenue.
- aeonax 1y ago
  If Visual Studio isn't to your liking then you can look at Rider or Visual Studio Code. Rider should make anyone who is used to JetBrains' other products fairly happy.
pier25 1y ago
I transitioned from Node to dotnet for backend last year and it's been great for APIs. Love C#. Performance is fantastic. The framework and tooling are very mature (with exceptions like hot reload ugh). Entity Framework is amazing, by far the best ORM I've ever used. I don't feel like an expert by any means but I'm productive. Some days I do hit some stuff that takes me longer that I would've hoped but I've been able to solve everything I've faced. I only use it for APIs though. The fullstack stuff is not great. Maybe if Microsoft improved hot-reload I would consider Razor with a Vite setup. Blazor is just useless for me. It's very cool from a technical standpoint but your frontend is 10x slower and more bloated than the worst JS solution you can think of. I connect my JS frontend layer with OpenAPI[1]. It's been ok but the whole OpenAPI experience is not as smooth as I had hoped. [1] https://openapi-ts.dev/ https://openapi-ts.dev/
- kasajian 1y ago
  Are you experiencing any perf issues when using "Blazor Server"?
  - pier25 1y ago
    I benchmarked rendering performance with Razor Pages and it was fantastic. I'm assuming Blazor Server is probably good too as long as you're not using the wasm stuff. The dx on the other hand... (just realized in my previous comment I didn't specify I meant Blazor with WASM)
fabian2k 1y ago
I really like C#, and I would generally vastly prefer it to NodeJS on the backend. I think one weakness is the library ecosystem, the competitors are stronger there. Most of the time this doesn't bother me as I also tend towards limiting dependencies in general. There is a positive aspect to this, as it makes decisions easier as well. For many areas there is often a single good choice, there aren't dozens of web frameworks you have to evaluate. There's ASP.NET Core and then nothing else for a long time. And for the most part those are pretty good, so it does not feel limiting. And C# doesn't have to be too enterprisy and over-abstracted. The community does tend a bit too much towards unnecessary abstractions in my opinion, but you don't have to use it that way.
- lloydatkinson 1y ago
  > I think one weakness is the library ecosystem, the competitors are stronger there. People say this but is it really the case? Look how much NPM has been attacked by malware recently, and all because people are indirectly installing simple colour libraries that are 20 layers deep of dependencies of dependencies. Then you get the fucking stupid stuff like `is-odd`.
  - StrangeWill 1y ago
    Long-time C# Dev here -- yeah I'm still jealous of being able to find more esoteric libraries in Node, Python or PHP -- or just having more options then someone's back-yard half-baked implementation sometimes. On the other hand, I have nearly 20 languages under my belt and have been writing code professionally for 22 years -- I still use C# most of the time for a lot of other reasons, just this is one of the bigger pain points.
brainzap 1y ago
I work at a .net shop and it is pain. Do not recommend.
- Nannooskeeska 1y ago
  I also work for a .NET shop and I absolutely love it. I'll happily work with .NET for the rest of my career.
- radicalbyte 1y ago
  It's very different in an Enterprise setting compared to a setting where it's being used by people who actually understand systems from logic gates up. The issues around .Net are in a lot of silly things people have been sold and an inertia of terrible frameworks if you're still in the full-fat-framework land.
StrangeWill 1y ago
We build a Shopify-leading platform on C# at a startup -- they got so much flak from colleagues about it being built on C# instead of Node or Python. Absolutely no reason other than "C# icky" -- they ended up with a platform that is crazy fast (and fast scales way easier, it handles a dumb amount of traffic without a lot of crazy design) Startup culture is toxic AF at times, bad engineering decisions for cargo cult stuff.
- brungarc 1y ago
  I experience the same. When I try to have a rational dialog about trade offs, there’s nothing there. Or the “only runs in Windows” classic 10+ years outdated stuff I’ve been writing C# on a Mac deploying on Linux for a decade.
radicalbyte 1y ago
We are (I mean I'm CTO & know C# better than most) but the only real downside is that there are a lot of people around Microsoft tech who are antithetical to startups. You have to be absolutely insane and/or highly inexperienced to even consider Javascript/Typescript on the back-end. Not only is the language a terrible match but the deep architectural failings of NPM have been clear for at least a decade.

bigonlogn 1y ago

Also, you can achieve some pretty fast development velocity with .NET. C# is intuitive and the tools are great. I know everyone complains about Visual Studio, but even it's most vocal complainers will admit it sets the industry standard for debugging. One sticking point is that the tools, while community and small projects, are all behind a license. But, they are free for small teams making under something like $1M/year in revenue.

aeonax 1y ago
If Visual Studio isn't to your liking then you can look at Rider or Visual Studio Code. Rider should make anyone who is used to JetBrains' other products fairly happy.

pier25 1y ago

I transitioned from Node to dotnet for backend last year and it's been great for APIs. Love C#. Performance is fantastic. The framework and tooling are very mature (with exceptions like hot reload ugh). Entity Framework is amazing, by far the best ORM I've ever used. I don't feel like an expert by any means but I'm productive. Some days I do hit some stuff that takes me longer that I would've hoped but I've been able to solve everything I've faced. I only use it for APIs though. The fullstack stuff is not great. Maybe if Microsoft improved hot-reload I would consider Razor with a Vite setup. Blazor is just useless for me. It's very cool from a technical standpoint but your frontend is 10x slower and more bloated than the worst JS solution you can think of. I connect my JS frontend layer with OpenAPI[1]. It's been ok but the whole OpenAPI experience is not as smooth as I had hoped. [1] https://openapi-ts.dev/ https://openapi-ts.dev/

kasajian 1y ago
Are you experiencing any perf issues when using "Blazor Server"?
- pier25 1y ago
  I benchmarked rendering performance with Razor Pages and it was fantastic. I'm assuming Blazor Server is probably good too as long as you're not using the wasm stuff. The dx on the other hand... (just realized in my previous comment I didn't specify I meant Blazor with WASM)

fabian2k 1y ago

I really like C#, and I would generally vastly prefer it to NodeJS on the backend. I think one weakness is the library ecosystem, the competitors are stronger there. Most of the time this doesn't bother me as I also tend towards limiting dependencies in general. There is a positive aspect to this, as it makes decisions easier as well. For many areas there is often a single good choice, there aren't dozens of web frameworks you have to evaluate. There's ASP.NET Core and then nothing else for a long time. And for the most part those are pretty good, so it does not feel limiting. And C# doesn't have to be too enterprisy and over-abstracted. The community does tend a bit too much towards unnecessary abstractions in my opinion, but you don't have to use it that way.

lloydatkinson 1y ago
> I think one weakness is the library ecosystem, the competitors are stronger there. People say this but is it really the case? Look how much NPM has been attacked by malware recently, and all because people are indirectly installing simple colour libraries that are 20 layers deep of dependencies of dependencies. Then you get the fucking stupid stuff like `is-odd`.
- StrangeWill 1y ago
  Long-time C# Dev here -- yeah I'm still jealous of being able to find more esoteric libraries in Node, Python or PHP -- or just having more options then someone's back-yard half-baked implementation sometimes. On the other hand, I have nearly 20 languages under my belt and have been writing code professionally for 22 years -- I still use C# most of the time for a lot of other reasons, just this is one of the bigger pain points.

brainzap 1y ago

I work at a .net shop and it is pain. Do not recommend.

Nannooskeeska 1y ago
I also work for a .NET shop and I absolutely love it. I'll happily work with .NET for the rest of my career.
radicalbyte 1y ago
It's very different in an Enterprise setting compared to a setting where it's being used by people who actually understand systems from logic gates up. The issues around .Net are in a lot of silly things people have been sold and an inertia of terrible frameworks if you're still in the full-fat-framework land.

StrangeWill 1y ago

We build a Shopify-leading platform on C# at a startup -- they got so much flak from colleagues about it being built on C# instead of Node or Python. Absolutely no reason other than "C# icky" -- they ended up with a platform that is crazy fast (and fast scales way easier, it handles a dumb amount of traffic without a lot of crazy design) Startup culture is toxic AF at times, bad engineering decisions for cargo cult stuff.

brungarc 1y ago
I experience the same. When I try to have a rational dialog about trade offs, there’s nothing there. Or the “only runs in Windows” classic 10+ years outdated stuff I’ve been writing C# on a Mac deploying on Linux for a decade.

radicalbyte 1y ago

We are (I mean I'm CTO & know C# better than most) but the only real downside is that there are a lot of people around Microsoft tech who are antithetical to startups. You have to be absolutely insane and/or highly inexperienced to even consider Javascript/Typescript on the back-end. Not only is the language a terrible match but the deep architectural failings of NPM have been clear for at least a decade.