9 ms·

Unapologetically build your startup technology in C#

97 points by sirchristian 12y ago

dkyc 12y ago
Interesting how the post completely ignores the quality of the language. Most people I know don't use C# for the same reason they don't use Java: Because it's often feels bloated, over-engineered and too verbose for building stuff fast. It has nothing to do with Microsoft, Azure or scaling, they just prefer whatever dynamic language they're comfortable with.
- leorocky 12y ago
  I've only ever heard good things about C#. I believe C# has first class anonymous functions, makes async operations easy, and a combination of VisualStudio and JetBrains resharper you have a pretty amazing development environment. I haven't programmed much with C#, but like I said I've only heard good things.
  - JackMorgan 12y ago
    C# is a fine option if your choices are C# or Java. On the other hand, F# is safer and 3 times more concise language that can do everything C# can It interops perfectly with any C#/VB.NET libraries. I'd think long and hard when writing any new C# code, and defend why you need to reduce your possible solutions to only those C# supports, when you could have the ability to do everything C# does and more with F#.
    - beauzero 12y ago
      If you want to get paid...use C#, if you want to get paid less...use vb.net, if you want to be right use F#. This is outside of the startup discussion here...but it is the general rule for MS developers. All three languages are comparable to the junior to mid level dev.
    - _random_ 12y ago
      For me personally, conciseness of F#, it's tendency to use short words, cram things together and overload operators actually make it less readable. I like many of the features F# has and am happy to see how they are slowly migrating to C#.
- skrebbel 12y ago
  I really feel like your idea of C# is based on C# 1. It's at version 5 now, and many modern C# codebases are hardly more verbose than Ruby. Still slightly more verbose, because types, but it's really incomparable to Java these days.
  - thescrewdriver 12y ago
    These days C# has more in common with Scala than it does with Java, even if C# 1.0 was virtually a clone of Java.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        Except they are planned for Java 9 and are already available in IBM J9 VM.
- duiker101 12y ago
  I think it's just a matter of being used to it. I use c# with MVC on a daily basis and starting up for me it's extremely easy. If I use Rails or anything else that people consider fast or w/e, I find myself extremely awkward. I can do it, but it takes ages to setup and everything. Instead of just going to IIS creating the website and creating the project in VS, that btw is the best IDE I have ever used and it's almost impossible for me to use anything else.
- arethuza 12y ago
  I can see people having reservations about C# for many reasons - mainly as to how closely it is tied to Microsoft and to Windows (yes, I know it is cross platform, but the focus of the eco-system in very much on Windows) - but I can't see the quality of the design of the language being much cause for concern. Personally, I think it's one of the nicer languages in that particular space at the moment - certainly much nicer than Java.
  - PyErr_SetString 12y ago
    "I know it is cross platform, but the focus of the eco-system in very much on Windows." There's a funny thing about its cross-platform nature: You almost never see C# apps on other platforms. Why is that? There must be thousands of useful C#/.Net applications made that other platforms could benefit from, but the ONLY ones I've seen are the ones that targeted Mono to begin with. Nothing else. Something fishy is going on here.
    - arethuza 12y ago
      What about Xamarin though: https://xamarin.com/ https://xamarin.com/ I've been kind of avoiding mobile development after getting my fingers slightly singed by spending too much time with jQuery Mobile before giving up - the one thing that tempts me to try doing some mobile development is the Xamarin tool set.
    - monkeyprojects 12y ago
      I think its simple. Unless the person is interested in Mono they don't develop for it and don't have any interest in supporting it. Many people use C# to develop applications for Windows and don't, won't or can't support other environments.... And while there are thousand of useful C# programs I doubt many don't have direct python / Linux competitors readily available that do near enough the same thing.
      - PyErr_SetString 12y ago
        "I think its simple. Unless the person is interested in Mono they don't develop for it and don't have any interest in supporting it." But why wouldn't someone who IS interested in running the application on Linux simply do the last bits to get it to other platforms? I have NEVER seen that happen. "And while there are thousand of useful C# programs I doubt many don't have direct python / Linux competitors readily available that do near enough the same thing." Sure, but I refuse to believe all the competitors are always doing a better job. There should be at least some application that found their way over to for example Linux.
- darylteo 12y ago
  > they just prefer whatever dynamic language That's the thing. If you're adamant on a dynamic language you won't even be looking at C# or Java. It has nothing to do with the quality of the language, but the choice of programming paradigm. Both C# and Java are quality languages. Given the choice between the two, I choose C# anyday. Sadly, this means Visual Studio... Resharper makes this slightly more tolerable.
  - JimmyM 12y ago
    C# I can handle (despite coming to it late, as part of Unity3D), but I find Java more and more frustrating to work with. To be honest, I think I'm just using it for the wrong thing - I don't tend to work on big, collaborative projects which is where Java really shines. Meanwhile, C# has a few conveniences (such as LINQ and rectangular arrays, off the top of my head) which seem to me to make scripting and small projects easier.
    - darylteo 12y ago
      > I don't tend to work on big, collaborative projects which is where Java really shines What aspects of C# makes working on large collaborative projects difficult? Not sure where you are going with this. Unless you meant Team Foundation Server / Visual Source Safe pukes.
      - JimmyM 12y ago
        > What aspects of C# makes working on large collaborative projects difficult? None. I was just talking about my issues with using Java for small projects, not using C# for large projects. My argument is that C# covers scripting and small utility programs adequately, while Java seems to require more boilerplate. C# would be my natural choice for projects large or small.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  > ignores the quality of the language ... just prefer whatever dynamic language they're comfortable with. "quality of the language" is not the same as the "dynamic" vs the "statically typed", "strongly typed" or "compiled" nature of the language. Strongly typed languages have definite advantages because of the type guarantees that they provide in any successfully successfully compiling program. They have disadvantages too as you mention. Nevertheless, many people feel strongly that where a strongly typed, statically typed, compiled language is available (i.e. not in a browser) it is an advantage to use it. And compared to java, c# generally is more terse and expressive. "Quality" is subjective depending on what you value. If you only hang with dynamic language people then yes, c# and java are not of interest to you. Don't mistake that for a quality issue, or a universally held opinion; it is a design goal and design philosophy issue.
alkonaut 12y ago
It's important to remember that C# does not imply .NET Xamarin has done some great stuff lately, for example you can use C# to make a native 3-platform mobile app. This is still proprietary tech, but it isn't Microsoft and it isn't .NET In my eyes the best thing about the .NET ecosystem is the tools, if you like me fancy a polished IDE like IDEA, then VS is definitely one of the best ones around. In my eyes tools are more important than platforms, languages and licenses. The productivity hit of poor tools is much more expensive than anything else. Also, if you are looking at C#, don't forget to consider F#. Compare a minimalist service built on Node/AWS with one built on F#/Azure and it's not too different in cost but a much nicer language and better tools.
- mreiland 12y ago
  C# does imply .net, just as it implies windows. Yes, other solutions exist, no those solutions aren't hugely popular in the grand scheme of things.
  - alkonaut 12y ago
    This has changed a lot, especially over the last couple of years, a lot due to the F# project. You should look at self-hosted NancyFx or ServiceStack with F# as a good alternative to Node.js The fact that the "other solutions" aren't popular is probably just because C# is the go to language in windows/.NET shops that already have knowledge and infrastructure. It's not that they are technically inferior.
onion2k 12y ago
When you're choosing a tech stack in a startup there's a very important factor to consider that this article neglects to mention. It's likely, if you have any measure of success or you go down the investment route, that you'll be expanding your technical team quite early. The availability and cost of developers is critical at the beginning. Building in languages like PHP, JS, Java, and to a lesser extend Perl and Python, means you have access to lots of cheap devs. Especially in the case of PHP and JS. Those languages will scale reasonably well to the tens of thousands of users, by which time you'll probably be raising a Series A and you'll be able to afford to shift the important bits of the code to a more appropriate language. While it might be 'right' to build in C# or Erlang or Haskell or Brainfuck or whatever, if you have to pay a premium to get your first engineer you'll be shortening your runway, and that's pretty much the worst thing you can do. It's much better to build in the 'wrong' stack to start with and give your startup time to get traction. At the end of the day, no one using your product gives a damn what it was built in.
- ehurrell 12y ago
  Absolutely true, and so often missed. While it may be true that a good programmer can learn any language the cost of this is time, and nowhere is the phrase 'time is money' more true than in a startup.
- biot 12y ago
  > Building in languages like PHP, JS, Java, and to a > lesser extend Perl and Python, means you have access to > lots of cheap devs. Especially in the case of PHP and JS. Given that PHP and JS is what Facebook's stack is written in, does this mean that Facebook pays below market salary and they're taking advantage of all those cheap devs who could instead be raking in the money at a C# company?
  - onion2k 12y ago
    I imagine 'coding in PHP' is quite a lot way down the list of requirements to work at FB. There are much more important skills, like being able to write code that works at scale. That isn't the case for most startups - prior experience of the tech stack is right at the top.
steviee 12y ago
Is your post about C# or the .NET stack? I can (somewhat) relate to using C# over some other languages. However what I cannot relate to is being trapped with the .NET stack. And a trap it is. You need expensive Windows Servers to host your stuff and Windows just disqualifies itself as a server platform (my subjective opinion). Having to use a powerful latest-tech machine and very recent OS version (2012?) with loads of patches, newest .NET framework just to host a super simple REST service with the almighty IIS is OVERKILL in every sense of the word. Some people even use this approach when all they do is run an AngularJS powered, single-page javascript web application. And my bullshit-meter just spikes when I see this kind of (use your imagination). I agree that Visual Studio is a good choice for Windows software development and that SQL Server is (maybe) a good choice, when you use VS.NET (or .NET at all). But that's just a dependency when you opt for the Microsoft world. Stay clear of it and save yourself some hair. Just my 2 cents! ;) Best regards and good look with all that you do, Steviee
- alkonaut 12y ago
  If I were to make a web backend of some kind I'd go with C#/F#, but NOT IIS, not SQL Server, and depending on the instance costs of hosting, perhaps not windows either. This is a good list of frameworks, including NancyFx, ServiceStack http://fsharp.org/guides/web/index.html http://fsharp.org/guides/web/index.html
- darylteo 12y ago
  > You need expensive Windows Servers to host your stuff and Windows just disqualifies itself as a server platform (my subjective opinion). Having to use a powerful latest-tech machine and very recent OS version (2012?) with loads of patches, newest .NET framework just to host a super simple REST service with the almighty IIS is OVERKILL in every sense of the word. This is true, I definitely agree. I am , however, excited to know that they are taking steps to change this. ASP VNext is the next generation of asp.net applications: standalone, framework bundled, cross platform. http://www.asp.net/vnext http://www.asp.net/vnext
  - NicoJuicy 12y ago
    > newest .NET framework just to host a super simple REST service with the almighty IIS is OVERKILL in every sense of the word. Then you are happy to read about Owin :-) using (WebApplication.Start<Startup>(url)) { Console.WriteLine("Server running on {0}", url); Console.ReadLine(); }
blibble 12y ago
there's nothing in that post that gives C# a measurable advantage over say, Java. Visual Studio Express? still way behind JetBrains IntelliJ (the community edition is FOSS). Visual Studio is unusable without JetBrains Resharper, which isn't cheap. Azure? AWS Bizspark? not required for Java dev as everything's free and OSS anyway. Popularity? most popular .net libraries/tools (NUnit, NAnt, NHibernate) are all clones of popular Java projects Scalability? those Windows licenses will cost you a fortune once you're out of bizspark Vendor lock-in? well it's still there with MS, just you're not paying them for three years (Bizspark)
- doczoidberg 12y ago
  a measurable advantage of c# over java is LINQ.
  - dtech 12y ago
    Java now has lambda's and a stream API, with which you can do the same thing as LINQ: http://blog.jooq.org/2013/11/02/does-java-8-still-need-linq-or-is-it-better-than-linq/ http://blog.jooq.org/2013/11/02/does-java-8-still-need-linq-....
    - bh213 12y ago
      LINQ has expression trees (or maybe I should say .NET has them). Libraries like autofac or moq would not be possible without them.
  - personZ 12y ago
    This is a very unpopular opinion among .NET advocates, but personally I think LINQ is the worst thing to ever happen to c#. It leads to (in my opinion) grotesque, unreadable code that more often than not hides enormous performance problems. It offers so much expressiveness, seemingly so innocent of its cost, that it gets massively overused and abused. As with all things in languages, one can argue "use it right", "don't work with bad programmers", etc, but I have found this to be a universal issue across a number of shops that I've been brought into: If the project uses LINQ to any degree, enormous performance problems almost always come along for the ride. Often this simply doesn't matter, hardware or low utility masking the problem. But when it becomes a problem, and it is endemic across the solution, it requires major reworking.
skrebbel 12y ago
I strongly agree with the author's conclusion, but I strongly disagree with many of his points. Notably, with his recommendation to consciously go all the way with the Microsoft vendor lock in. Our startup's backend is made in C#, and we're very happy with the choice. We use Postgres, we host it on Docker containers on Linux, and our devs are equally spread over Windows, OSX and Linux. MonoDevelop is a remarkably great IDE for something with so few users, for example, and great open source like Dapper and ServiceStack.OrmLite make it super easy for us to interface with Postgres and use all of Postgres's unique features (Json as a first class data type, multiple-cursor result sets, stuff like that). The author seems to propose "get all the free Microsoft goodies when you start, and once you really need the paid versions you're probably successful enough that the cost doesn't matter much". It is Microsoft's strategy that companies do this, and it's a valid one, but it's really not what I would do. Microsoft might've become a whole lot more open these days, but tying yourself in so much with a single provider sounds, well, dangerous no matter what. For example, if you develop your C# app for Azure, moving to a different provider is a lot of work (much like if you want to move your Rails app away from Heroku, but with less open source out there to ease the road). If you develop your C# app to work platform-independent (or at least cloud-provider-independent) from the outset, then you're free to move whenever you want.
- sirchristian 12y ago
  I agree "get all the free Microsoft goodies when you start, and once you really need the paid versions you're probably successful enough that the cost doesn't matter much" is one fair conclusion to the article. However I don't believe that's the only conclusion. Mostly I want .NET to be a consideration as an option when building out the technology in a startup. I'm concerned about vender lock-in as well, just less concerned then I used to be. Microsoft's gone to great lengths to reduce some of my concerns. The fact that you are using C# with Postgres demonstrates that there doesn't need to be complete lock-in. Do you mind sharing more about what your C#/Postgres app looks like? This combination is one option I'll be looking at for my next venture.
  - JackMorgan 12y ago
    Why do you want .NET to be considered?
ryanmim 12y ago
There are two people talking in my head while I read this post. One says : Too many people obsess about backends. Yes, build your startup in C# and a .NET stack if that's what your familiar with. The backend ultimately doesn't matter, and the faster you can create and then iterate on your product, the better off you'll be. The primary factor that will decide whether your startup is successful or not is if people like your product and actually use it. None of your users will know or care what you built it in, be it .NET, RoR, Django, Yii, whatever. The other person in my head is saying. "OH MY GOD NO". I've used the .NET stack and various OSS stacks to build complicated web applications. From this experience, I've concluded that the .NET stack sucks. Yes it works, but almost any OSS Framework will provide a much better developer experience. Better while developing the initial product, and better when maintaining and extending it.
- mkohlmyr 12y ago
  If there's a good chance you are going to have other developers get involved in the codebase then other considerations come up. E.g. how easy it is to find such a developer, how competitive pay is for the platform, how well established coding standards are to ease collaboration, what type of developer you want to attract (likelihood of being full-stack, willingness to learn about new technologies, experience, ..). Not to say .NET can't still be the right choice. Just that there are other points to consider other than strictly personal preference. You could argue for an MVP this isn't the case but honestly I think being in a position where you have to do a full rewrite a year later is in some ways worse than facing a (hopefully slight) learning curve when starting out.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  Better how? C#'s one of the best languages in town and the IDE's the unchallenged best in town by a long way. And the SQL product is amazing, much better than MySlowQL. So what bit is better? Deployment? Hosting? I'm genuinely asking here, you're just waving hands. I've used both, the thing that puts me off .Net is the lack of choice when new stuff comes out (like elasticsearch, or a new language, or something like Docker) as it usually takes a year or so before it's easy to use on Windows, but that's about it.
royjacobs 12y ago
I work at a company where we have built one of our products (a large distributed system that tracks television content worldwide) completely on .NET. I love C#, it's a very decent blend between a whole lot of languages and additions of LINQ and async/await kept it relevant. Visual Studio is the best IDE I've worked with, not because it's such a good editor but because it has a sane debugger that is actually helpful. I still wouldn't run my startup on .NET though, for a number of reasons. Mono simply isn't there yet. Code that works fine on Windows mysteriously stops working on Mono due to threading or GC vagaries (yes, even in the latest version). This isn't a dealbreaker, but it is pretty annoying especially since debugging these kinds of problems are of precisely the kind that I don't want to debug. The ecosystem is really quite poor compared to, say, JVM or Node. For all the faults of either, there is a LOT of stuff going on and there is a LOT of innovation that is sorely lacking from the .NET world. .NET usually catches up eventually but it's either late or half-hearted (just look at the progress of NHibernate vs. Hibernate). I think ASP.NET vNext is a step in a very good direction and I hope to be able to change my opinion sometime next year.
- darylteo 12y ago
  > NHibernate vs. Hibernate As a counter argument to that (specifically), we don't really need NHibernate when we have Entity Framework.
  - royjacobs 12y ago
    When you start from scratch I'd agree with you, but if you want to interface with a legacy database and you need some more esoteric mappings and user-defined types then I'm not sure how happy you'd be with EF.
  - steviee 12y ago
    As a counter-counter point: You absolutely need NHibernate (or something else) when you use EF. Steviee
    - beauzero 12y ago
      The proof is in Orchard CMS.
billpg 12y ago
I'm getting a 404 error. Is there a cached copy out there? EDIT: The blog's front page has a full copy of the article at the top. (As I write this at least.)
- dtech 12y ago
  But it still being DoS'ed by HN traffic. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sirchristian.net/blog/2014/06/21/unapologetically-build-your-startup-technology-in-c-net/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Htsthbjig 12y ago
I always wondered why computer languages and economy becomes religion and dogma. We use multiple languages and multiple OS in my company. When you have a company you have your own interest and your customers interest in mind. Some times those interest are not the same of Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM or Oracle. Just developing on a single proprietary language from a single company on a single OS (and yes I know Mono and I don't have a good opinion on it) is a huge red flag for me. We use whatever is necessary for solving our customers problems. Some times it means using C#, most most of the times we use better alternatives.
- steviee 12y ago
  I agree. My experience (and please tell me when I'm wrong) is that Windows developers for the most part stick to their choice of framework while multi-OS (Windows included) developers are more open to the wonders of the world. So statistically the .NET guys may be more narrow-minded regarding development stacks. Steviee
  - darylteo 12y ago
    > So statistically the .NET guys may be more narrow-minded regarding development stacks. While true, .net developers don't need to venture out very far, I don't believe its solely because of narrow-mindedness (sure you'll find these developers everywhere, I can argue that node developers are narrow minded with node + express + mongo for example... hell people still write PHP =) ). With .NET the reality is that there is no reason to consider anything else within the stack. Everything is standard, and most companies have them as part of MSDN. Majority of established .net enterprise environments use SQL Server with either ASP.NET webforms or MVC.net running on IIS + Win Server. What open source considers "vendor lock-in" is considered "standardised technology" in enterprise environments. When considering client work the first question is: "right what do you need to do?" and not "right, what stack are you using". With Java, one client I have to learn Struts, another client I have to learn Play, then another client I have to learn JEE. I know Gradle in and out, but another contract requires me to know Maven, while another contract requires me to know Ant. Standalone server? Or Tomcat / Apache / WebSphere? With Node, everyone has their own templating language (Jade or Handlebars or other). Some use CoffeeScript over plain Javascript. Some use SASS/LESS/ or just plain CSS. Some forward proxy using Haproxy, others NginX. The point is: while the .net stack is pretty narrow, we know it works in the majority of use cases. And that's usually enough.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
The throwaway comment is this: who cares about backends? Go make something people want. Every second you spend chatting tech is wasting your time. Make something people want even if you have to do it with a pencil and paper. Worry about the tech when you've figured out step one. 99% of startups don't do this. So for all of the armchair startup warriors out there, the guys eager to hear if Facebook is really running MongoDB or what their sharding plan looks like, let's look at the tech. I'm a MS hound from way back. I made a bet -- a very good one -- back in the 90s that MS was going to own the PC market. And it did. And life was good. Microsoft sold tools and apps, I came in and programmed using those tools and apps. Many times I came in after the local yokels had already screwed things up. This meant a higher bill rate. Life was nice. But I started noticing something: there was a certain arrogant-jerk-inbred-echo-chamber feeling to the MS community. MS pimped tools to the developers. Developers ate it up. MS pimped new servers to their MVPs. The MVPs sold them to corporations, consultants came in and collected. It was all fine and dandy, but over time there just got to be more and more tools and apps, and more and more servers and experts. Any small reasonable thing you'd like to do, like set up an email server, involved books, certifications, special servers, learning the acquisition history of all these small companies, and so on. It was ludicrous that any one person could be an expert enough to maintain the small set of tools that most folks would need. Microsoft was adding complexity -- unneeded complexity -- into everything it touched. More troubling, once I started learning more about startups, I saw developers obsess over new Microsoft tools or third-party components instead of making things people wanted. Microsoft's interests was in creating and maintaining this ecosystem of selling servers and tools, not in helping people make things other people want. So I'd see these projects that were supposed to be solving a simple problem. They'd use all kinds of fat, bloated, feature-laden junk strung together in a huge pile of tech. Then somebody would start down the "happy path" of making a "hello world " app work. Very soon, however, developers ventured off the happy path, and then they had to learn javascript, html, SMTP, SQL, and so on. So development consisted of salivating over new stuff, eagerly installing it, and then wandering around in the weeds trying to hook all the pieces together. And oh, by the way, the user was supposed to like it. But, let's face it, screw the user. We're here for the tech, right? I still love the CLR and several other things Microsoft has created. But I'm not part of the ecosystem any more, and I won't spend any time at all learning whatever new version of Silverlight they'll have out next year. I'll also stick to my command line and bash, thank you very much. I've been burned too many times, and I've seen too many development teams destroy their productivity by getting lost in the Microsoft ecosystem.
resca79 12y ago
IMHO the problem in not a programming language choice, but the entire ecosystem that you should support if you will use microsoft. Today for ex. linode and digital ocean have a very cheap entry price around 5$, with the power of entire open source lib, and the power of the community of every open source project.
deleted 12y ago
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againBlahbl4h 12y ago
Its weird that the HN crowd just seems to assume that the advice to use linux and mono just has to be a better idea than using windows. If you haven't looked at windows since 2003 you really need to take a look at server 2012 R2. The default installation mode is server core. It requires dramatically fewer patches. Management with PowerShell is incredibly powerful. IIS has seen many, many improvements. Also, "developing your app for azure" is a weird statement. If you develop for Azure Websites you are literally just writing an asp.net web app or api. it runs in IIS in a VM. It just has some management wrapped around it so that you don't have to take care of the VM(s). It has autscale, monitoring, and all the stuff you would expect from a cloud provider. Writing your app to use SQL Azure, or Azure storage, or something like that is just like using the comparable services from Amazon. It's like anything else...you should implement its usage as an interface so you can swap it out if need be. Some people on HN have accused me of working for MS just because I use their stuff. I'm not, nor have I ever been, a MS employee. I'll admit that I started looking into windows a couple of years ago because I was bored with Linux and Unix. I've found that if you put the time in to understand how it works its incredibly productive and thorough. If you try to make it work like unix it will suck. If you learn PowerShell and stay away from the "clickety-clickety" thing it's awesome. From a development standpoint I actually like the total stack approach...but that's me. If you need to use best of breed components you can still do that with .Net. For me though, my interests shifted to C++ a while ago, so .Net stuff for web api's get's the work done when I have to do it. I would like to see more stuff like openstack in the .net world, but system center is fine. The stuff that I do ends up being important enough for enterprises that getting funds for that kind of thing is just part of the package. That's another thing. I'm completely uninterested in startups. I've worked at startups in various roles in the past and I'm just over it. Any startup that I built would have to be something that I could run by myself that immediately made money that I would keep. Investment funding is shit. It's a hassle that is super crazy. Dealing with "business" types that aren't technical enough to understand the challenges is also completely off the table. If you did choose to work with a VC then it's much better to be making money and talking about selling out totally instead of implanting them in your life. Shudder. The one thing that I think Windows needs is a container style app deployment model. The coolest thing going in large scale app building is CoreOS. Its the future of how a large scale app will be built and deployed. The new, and much loathed, metro applications are actually a good starting place for building a container system. They use feature called "app containers" that was first introduced in Vista. Add to that an app package that installs and uninstalls as a unit, called APPX. They haven't made any noise about using the new app model for servers, but it would be a great idea. It uses an API monitor that stops calls to things like LoadLibrary or GetProcAddress and all the other API's that let you bootstrap malware. Anyway, like I said, they haven't made any noise about it...it would be cool though.
nikon 12y ago
Man, 6 months ago I would have agreed with you. Hell I even have a year old BizSpark membership. I just couldn't get over the thought in the back of my head that I'm making the wrong decision investing in Microsoft's development platform. C# is literally my favorite language, but I felt trapped and missed open source... Both the freedom it brings and the community. Maybe I spend too much time on HN. I even tried to go 'indie' .NET. I moved to RavenDB (fuck MSSQL and it's overpricedness, and EF) and stuck with Azure, so really my only costs after my 3 years would be an MSDN license per developer. But in the end I just gave in to my worries. One weekend I just rewrote the damn thing in NodeJS and I'm pretty happy. No need to boot up my Windows VM anymore either. I think the talent pool is also what put me off. There seems to be - in London at least - a lot of career developers who pick .NET.
daigoba66 12y ago
So here is my take: I'm currently working on a SaaS product built on .NET running on Windows Server, IIS, and SQL Server. We're not really a "startup" anymore, but we're still very small. I wasn't here when the first version of the product was built so I wasn't part of that decision. If I were building this product from scratch today as a money-poor startup, I would probably go with tech stack included Java or Python and PostgreSQL. The primary motivation being cost (as in money). Each developer is technically required to have an MSDN/VS Pro license (renews for just under $1000 per year). This is not very expensive if you're generating revenue, but if bootstrapping it is not cheap. You could cheat and just share a single license; you definitely won't get caught. Windows Server licenses, compared to other datacenter costs, are relatively inexpensive. Windows Server has a few advantages; particularly in it's easy to administer and there are plenty of sysadmins out there than know it well. The elephant in the room, at least for a SaaS product, is SQL Server. The features of Enterprise Edition are so compelling for SaaS (HADR, unlimited RAM, online index operations, compression, and encryption) that it's practically a requirement. But this will quickly become one of the most expensive costs in your datacenter. But in my experience, SQL Server has some real advantages that I haven't yet discovered for PostgreSQL. The "community" around SQL Server is huge and has a ton of great people who love to help (often for free!). For instance check out http://brentozar.com http://brentozar.com or http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic/ http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic/. There are programs like Bizspark which can bring the initial software license investment down to nearly $0. But if you're not generating significant revenue after three years, the licensing costs could hurt. So like everything in world, it depends. But the bottom line is that, in my opinion, if you're bootstrapping then costs matter and Microsoft products (SQL Server in particular) are a huge cost which have real viable alternatives.
- penguat 12y ago
  new VS subscription licences don't seem to be well publicised, but I'm pretty sure that $1000 could be cut down: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-gb/products/visual-studio-online-professional-vs http://www.visualstudio.com/en-gb/products/visual-studio-onl... - Assuming I'm reading it correctly.
  - 12y ago
raphinou 12y ago
Not saying it is the case here, but blogs praising ms tech always raise some flags with me, as with http://www.pcworld.com/article/2365060/microsoft-caught-astroturfing-bloggers-again-to-promote-internet-explorer.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2365060/microsoft-caught-astr...
zargath 12y ago
running 30+ windows servers Microsoft has become much better, but still not sexy. Don't ever think they can fix everything for you, find out what they do well and what suxx and then do workarounds. Still too much microsoft and too little webstandards. They upgrade more and fix more bugs, but this also break more stuff. Asp.MVC upgrades can be a pain.. .Net Core, C#, Linq, etc.. all very cool. Can make some stuff that performs very well, but can be very tricky to scale. Asp.net i still too slow and too heavy.. taking >1min to start a asp.mvc site? It feels like some old grandpa compared to Node.js, Go and even PHP. Powershell is still behind Window Server administration can be very slow, .. how can it take 30seconds to draw an Event log ? Really miss ssh or even telnet. Windows Services and schedules can be a pain. How can "access denied let the service run forever without notification??" The license system is crap, they make their costumers feel stupid when they cant figure out how to renew they Action Pack's, etc.. And their crappy sales ppl, trying to push Sharepoint because they hear the word software and web. So I really regret working with microsoft, althought I like some of .Net and C#, but what does one do for a good project and a salery. Next project will not be .net for sure..
- CmonDev 12y ago
  >> "Node.js" If you need an HTTP Reactor pattern implementation in .NET, there is one coming soon. Patterns are not hot or old, they are just different for different needs.
perltricks 12y ago
I use C# for work and it is a nice language to work with. However mono runs dog-slow compared to C# and is practically unusable. So you are locked in.
- knocte 12y ago
  > However mono runs dog-slow compared to C# and is practically unusable Did you file a bug about this? What version of Mono were you using?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
brandonhsiao 12y ago
the article seems to be saying C# is cheap and fast because it has a really good set of libraries. i have no problem believing this. the question in a startup is, is it more important to have good libraries or a powerful language? e.g. lisp is the most powerful language, but its library ecosystem isn't reliable enough. whereas java is a weak language but has great libraries. (that's why clojure's awesome!) i'm not trying to start any kind of religious war here, but this is personally why i (and i suspect many others) code their web apps in python. it's a reasonably powerful language with an excellent set of libraries to go with it.
dnesteruk 12y ago
Another equally potent idea is to build products which integrate with Microsoft's own, popular products. For example, the popularity of Excel caused me to build this: http://activemesa.com/x2c http://activemesa.com/x2c
marvin 12y ago
I did my Masters thesis in Computer Science in C# (data visualization). No apologies. A couple of people around the Institute have looked at me funny, but it's turned out to be a very good choice.
dexterchief 12y ago
By all means, unapologetically build your startup with C#/.NET. Every Linux/OSS based startup you will be competing with agrees with this recommendation.
DonnyV 12y ago
I'm currently working on my own startup. But didn't go the full Microsoft stack route. I use C# and Visual Studio for development. I think right now nothing beats VS for pure production output. I do all development on a Windows box. All frameworks work on Windows and Linux. Nancyfx - web framework Cassette - asset optimization Mongodb - database Production server uses Ubuntu + Mono + Nginx. $20 VM on Digital Ocean. Provides a nice balance of best of bread tooling and cheap production costs.
wdr1 12y ago
I had a hard time getting past: > In reality Microsoft doesn’t want your money until you can afford to give it to them. Building your business on that premise seems very dubious at best.

97 points by sirchristian 12y ago

dkyc 12y ago

Interesting how the post completely ignores the quality of the language. Most people I know don't use C# for the same reason they don't use Java: Because it's often feels bloated, over-engineered and too verbose for building stuff fast. It has nothing to do with Microsoft, Azure or scaling, they just prefer whatever dynamic language they're comfortable with.

leorocky 12y ago
I've only ever heard good things about C#. I believe C# has first class anonymous functions, makes async operations easy, and a combination of VisualStudio and JetBrains resharper you have a pretty amazing development environment. I haven't programmed much with C#, but like I said I've only heard good things.
- JackMorgan 12y ago
  C# is a fine option if your choices are C# or Java. On the other hand, F# is safer and 3 times more concise language that can do everything C# can It interops perfectly with any C#/VB.NET libraries. I'd think long and hard when writing any new C# code, and defend why you need to reduce your possible solutions to only those C# supports, when you could have the ability to do everything C# does and more with F#.
  - beauzero 12y ago
    If you want to get paid...use C#, if you want to get paid less...use vb.net, if you want to be right use F#. This is outside of the startup discussion here...but it is the general rule for MS developers. All three languages are comparable to the junior to mid level dev.
  - _random_ 12y ago
    For me personally, conciseness of F#, it's tendency to use short words, cram things together and overload operators actually make it less readable. I like many of the features F# has and am happy to see how they are slowly migrating to C#.
skrebbel 12y ago
I really feel like your idea of C# is based on C# 1. It's at version 5 now, and many modern C# codebases are hardly more verbose than Ruby. Still slightly more verbose, because types, but it's really incomparable to Java these days.
- thescrewdriver 12y ago
  These days C# has more in common with Scala than it does with Java, even if C# 1.0 was virtually a clone of Java.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      Except they are planned for Java 9 and are already available in IBM J9 VM.
duiker101 12y ago
I think it's just a matter of being used to it. I use c# with MVC on a daily basis and starting up for me it's extremely easy. If I use Rails or anything else that people consider fast or w/e, I find myself extremely awkward. I can do it, but it takes ages to setup and everything. Instead of just going to IIS creating the website and creating the project in VS, that btw is the best IDE I have ever used and it's almost impossible for me to use anything else.
arethuza 12y ago
I can see people having reservations about C# for many reasons - mainly as to how closely it is tied to Microsoft and to Windows (yes, I know it is cross platform, but the focus of the eco-system in very much on Windows) - but I can't see the quality of the design of the language being much cause for concern. Personally, I think it's one of the nicer languages in that particular space at the moment - certainly much nicer than Java.
- PyErr_SetString 12y ago
  "I know it is cross platform, but the focus of the eco-system in very much on Windows." There's a funny thing about its cross-platform nature: You almost never see C# apps on other platforms. Why is that? There must be thousands of useful C#/.Net applications made that other platforms could benefit from, but the ONLY ones I've seen are the ones that targeted Mono to begin with. Nothing else. Something fishy is going on here.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    What about Xamarin though: https://xamarin.com/ https://xamarin.com/ I've been kind of avoiding mobile development after getting my fingers slightly singed by spending too much time with jQuery Mobile before giving up - the one thing that tempts me to try doing some mobile development is the Xamarin tool set.
  - monkeyprojects 12y ago
    I think its simple. Unless the person is interested in Mono they don't develop for it and don't have any interest in supporting it. Many people use C# to develop applications for Windows and don't, won't or can't support other environments.... And while there are thousand of useful C# programs I doubt many don't have direct python / Linux competitors readily available that do near enough the same thing.
    - PyErr_SetString 12y ago
      "I think its simple. Unless the person is interested in Mono they don't develop for it and don't have any interest in supporting it." But why wouldn't someone who IS interested in running the application on Linux simply do the last bits to get it to other platforms? I have NEVER seen that happen. "And while there are thousand of useful C# programs I doubt many don't have direct python / Linux competitors readily available that do near enough the same thing." Sure, but I refuse to believe all the competitors are always doing a better job. There should be at least some application that found their way over to for example Linux.
darylteo 12y ago
> they just prefer whatever dynamic language That's the thing. If you're adamant on a dynamic language you won't even be looking at C# or Java. It has nothing to do with the quality of the language, but the choice of programming paradigm. Both C# and Java are quality languages. Given the choice between the two, I choose C# anyday. Sadly, this means Visual Studio... Resharper makes this slightly more tolerable.
- JimmyM 12y ago
  C# I can handle (despite coming to it late, as part of Unity3D), but I find Java more and more frustrating to work with. To be honest, I think I'm just using it for the wrong thing - I don't tend to work on big, collaborative projects which is where Java really shines. Meanwhile, C# has a few conveniences (such as LINQ and rectangular arrays, off the top of my head) which seem to me to make scripting and small projects easier.
  - darylteo 12y ago
    > I don't tend to work on big, collaborative projects which is where Java really shines What aspects of C# makes working on large collaborative projects difficult? Not sure where you are going with this. Unless you meant Team Foundation Server / Visual Source Safe pukes.
    - JimmyM 12y ago
      > What aspects of C# makes working on large collaborative projects difficult? None. I was just talking about my issues with using Java for small projects, not using C# for large projects. My argument is that C# covers scripting and small utility programs adequately, while Java seems to require more boilerplate. C# would be my natural choice for projects large or small.
SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
> ignores the quality of the language ... just prefer whatever dynamic language they're comfortable with. "quality of the language" is not the same as the "dynamic" vs the "statically typed", "strongly typed" or "compiled" nature of the language. Strongly typed languages have definite advantages because of the type guarantees that they provide in any successfully successfully compiling program. They have disadvantages too as you mention. Nevertheless, many people feel strongly that where a strongly typed, statically typed, compiled language is available (i.e. not in a browser) it is an advantage to use it. And compared to java, c# generally is more terse and expressive. "Quality" is subjective depending on what you value. If you only hang with dynamic language people then yes, c# and java are not of interest to you. Don't mistake that for a quality issue, or a universally held opinion; it is a design goal and design philosophy issue.

alkonaut 12y ago

It's important to remember that C# does not imply .NET Xamarin has done some great stuff lately, for example you can use C# to make a native 3-platform mobile app. This is still proprietary tech, but it isn't Microsoft and it isn't .NET In my eyes the best thing about the .NET ecosystem is the tools, if you like me fancy a polished IDE like IDEA, then VS is definitely one of the best ones around. In my eyes tools are more important than platforms, languages and licenses. The productivity hit of poor tools is much more expensive than anything else. Also, if you are looking at C#, don't forget to consider F#. Compare a minimalist service built on Node/AWS with one built on F#/Azure and it's not too different in cost but a much nicer language and better tools.

mreiland 12y ago
C# does imply .net, just as it implies windows. Yes, other solutions exist, no those solutions aren't hugely popular in the grand scheme of things.
- alkonaut 12y ago
  This has changed a lot, especially over the last couple of years, a lot due to the F# project. You should look at self-hosted NancyFx or ServiceStack with F# as a good alternative to Node.js The fact that the "other solutions" aren't popular is probably just because C# is the go to language in windows/.NET shops that already have knowledge and infrastructure. It's not that they are technically inferior.

onion2k 12y ago

When you're choosing a tech stack in a startup there's a very important factor to consider that this article neglects to mention. It's likely, if you have any measure of success or you go down the investment route, that you'll be expanding your technical team quite early. The availability and cost of developers is critical at the beginning. Building in languages like PHP, JS, Java, and to a lesser extend Perl and Python, means you have access to lots of cheap devs. Especially in the case of PHP and JS. Those languages will scale reasonably well to the tens of thousands of users, by which time you'll probably be raising a Series A and you'll be able to afford to shift the important bits of the code to a more appropriate language. While it might be 'right' to build in C# or Erlang or Haskell or Brainfuck or whatever, if you have to pay a premium to get your first engineer you'll be shortening your runway, and that's pretty much the worst thing you can do. It's much better to build in the 'wrong' stack to start with and give your startup time to get traction. At the end of the day, no one using your product gives a damn what it was built in.

ehurrell 12y ago
Absolutely true, and so often missed. While it may be true that a good programmer can learn any language the cost of this is time, and nowhere is the phrase 'time is money' more true than in a startup.
biot 12y ago
> Building in languages like PHP, JS, Java, and to a > lesser extend Perl and Python, means you have access to > lots of cheap devs. Especially in the case of PHP and JS. Given that PHP and JS is what Facebook's stack is written in, does this mean that Facebook pays below market salary and they're taking advantage of all those cheap devs who could instead be raking in the money at a C# company?
- onion2k 12y ago
  I imagine 'coding in PHP' is quite a lot way down the list of requirements to work at FB. There are much more important skills, like being able to write code that works at scale. That isn't the case for most startups - prior experience of the tech stack is right at the top.

steviee 12y ago

Is your post about C# or the .NET stack? I can (somewhat) relate to using C# over some other languages. However what I cannot relate to is being trapped with the .NET stack. And a trap it is. You need expensive Windows Servers to host your stuff and Windows just disqualifies itself as a server platform (my subjective opinion). Having to use a powerful latest-tech machine and very recent OS version (2012?) with loads of patches, newest .NET framework just to host a super simple REST service with the almighty IIS is OVERKILL in every sense of the word. Some people even use this approach when all they do is run an AngularJS powered, single-page javascript web application. And my bullshit-meter just spikes when I see this kind of (use your imagination). I agree that Visual Studio is a good choice for Windows software development and that SQL Server is (maybe) a good choice, when you use VS.NET (or .NET at all). But that's just a dependency when you opt for the Microsoft world. Stay clear of it and save yourself some hair. Just my 2 cents! ;) Best regards and good look with all that you do, Steviee

alkonaut 12y ago
If I were to make a web backend of some kind I'd go with C#/F#, but NOT IIS, not SQL Server, and depending on the instance costs of hosting, perhaps not windows either. This is a good list of frameworks, including NancyFx, ServiceStack http://fsharp.org/guides/web/index.html http://fsharp.org/guides/web/index.html
darylteo 12y ago
> You need expensive Windows Servers to host your stuff and Windows just disqualifies itself as a server platform (my subjective opinion). Having to use a powerful latest-tech machine and very recent OS version (2012?) with loads of patches, newest .NET framework just to host a super simple REST service with the almighty IIS is OVERKILL in every sense of the word. This is true, I definitely agree. I am , however, excited to know that they are taking steps to change this. ASP VNext is the next generation of asp.net applications: standalone, framework bundled, cross platform. http://www.asp.net/vnext http://www.asp.net/vnext
- NicoJuicy 12y ago
  > newest .NET framework just to host a super simple REST service with the almighty IIS is OVERKILL in every sense of the word. Then you are happy to read about Owin :-) using (WebApplication.Start<Startup>(url)) { Console.WriteLine("Server running on {0}", url); Console.ReadLine(); }

blibble 12y ago

there's nothing in that post that gives C# a measurable advantage over say, Java. Visual Studio Express? still way behind JetBrains IntelliJ (the community edition is FOSS). Visual Studio is unusable without JetBrains Resharper, which isn't cheap. Azure? AWS Bizspark? not required for Java dev as everything's free and OSS anyway. Popularity? most popular .net libraries/tools (NUnit, NAnt, NHibernate) are all clones of popular Java projects Scalability? those Windows licenses will cost you a fortune once you're out of bizspark Vendor lock-in? well it's still there with MS, just you're not paying them for three years (Bizspark)

doczoidberg 12y ago
a measurable advantage of c# over java is LINQ.
- dtech 12y ago
  Java now has lambda's and a stream API, with which you can do the same thing as LINQ: http://blog.jooq.org/2013/11/02/does-java-8-still-need-linq-or-is-it-better-than-linq/ http://blog.jooq.org/2013/11/02/does-java-8-still-need-linq-....
  - bh213 12y ago
    LINQ has expression trees (or maybe I should say .NET has them). Libraries like autofac or moq would not be possible without them.
- personZ 12y ago
  This is a very unpopular opinion among .NET advocates, but personally I think LINQ is the worst thing to ever happen to c#. It leads to (in my opinion) grotesque, unreadable code that more often than not hides enormous performance problems. It offers so much expressiveness, seemingly so innocent of its cost, that it gets massively overused and abused. As with all things in languages, one can argue "use it right", "don't work with bad programmers", etc, but I have found this to be a universal issue across a number of shops that I've been brought into: If the project uses LINQ to any degree, enormous performance problems almost always come along for the ride. Often this simply doesn't matter, hardware or low utility masking the problem. But when it becomes a problem, and it is endemic across the solution, it requires major reworking.

skrebbel 12y ago

I strongly agree with the author's conclusion, but I strongly disagree with many of his points. Notably, with his recommendation to consciously go all the way with the Microsoft vendor lock in. Our startup's backend is made in C#, and we're very happy with the choice. We use Postgres, we host it on Docker containers on Linux, and our devs are equally spread over Windows, OSX and Linux. MonoDevelop is a remarkably great IDE for something with so few users, for example, and great open source like Dapper and ServiceStack.OrmLite make it super easy for us to interface with Postgres and use all of Postgres's unique features (Json as a first class data type, multiple-cursor result sets, stuff like that). The author seems to propose "get all the free Microsoft goodies when you start, and once you really need the paid versions you're probably successful enough that the cost doesn't matter much". It is Microsoft's strategy that companies do this, and it's a valid one, but it's really not what I would do. Microsoft might've become a whole lot more open these days, but tying yourself in so much with a single provider sounds, well, dangerous no matter what. For example, if you develop your C# app for Azure, moving to a different provider is a lot of work (much like if you want to move your Rails app away from Heroku, but with less open source out there to ease the road). If you develop your C# app to work platform-independent (or at least cloud-provider-independent) from the outset, then you're free to move whenever you want.

sirchristian 12y ago
I agree "get all the free Microsoft goodies when you start, and once you really need the paid versions you're probably successful enough that the cost doesn't matter much" is one fair conclusion to the article. However I don't believe that's the only conclusion. Mostly I want .NET to be a consideration as an option when building out the technology in a startup. I'm concerned about vender lock-in as well, just less concerned then I used to be. Microsoft's gone to great lengths to reduce some of my concerns. The fact that you are using C# with Postgres demonstrates that there doesn't need to be complete lock-in. Do you mind sharing more about what your C#/Postgres app looks like? This combination is one option I'll be looking at for my next venture.
- JackMorgan 12y ago
  Why do you want .NET to be considered?

ryanmim 12y ago

There are two people talking in my head while I read this post. One says : Too many people obsess about backends. Yes, build your startup in C# and a .NET stack if that's what your familiar with. The backend ultimately doesn't matter, and the faster you can create and then iterate on your product, the better off you'll be. The primary factor that will decide whether your startup is successful or not is if people like your product and actually use it. None of your users will know or care what you built it in, be it .NET, RoR, Django, Yii, whatever. The other person in my head is saying. "OH MY GOD NO". I've used the .NET stack and various OSS stacks to build complicated web applications. From this experience, I've concluded that the .NET stack sucks. Yes it works, but almost any OSS Framework will provide a much better developer experience. Better while developing the initial product, and better when maintaining and extending it.

mkohlmyr 12y ago
If there's a good chance you are going to have other developers get involved in the codebase then other considerations come up. E.g. how easy it is to find such a developer, how competitive pay is for the platform, how well established coding standards are to ease collaboration, what type of developer you want to attract (likelihood of being full-stack, willingness to learn about new technologies, experience, ..). Not to say .NET can't still be the right choice. Just that there are other points to consider other than strictly personal preference. You could argue for an MVP this isn't the case but honestly I think being in a position where you have to do a full rewrite a year later is in some ways worse than facing a (hopefully slight) learning curve when starting out.
mattmanser 12y ago
Better how? C#'s one of the best languages in town and the IDE's the unchallenged best in town by a long way. And the SQL product is amazing, much better than MySlowQL. So what bit is better? Deployment? Hosting? I'm genuinely asking here, you're just waving hands. I've used both, the thing that puts me off .Net is the lack of choice when new stuff comes out (like elasticsearch, or a new language, or something like Docker) as it usually takes a year or so before it's easy to use on Windows, but that's about it.

royjacobs 12y ago

I work at a company where we have built one of our products (a large distributed system that tracks television content worldwide) completely on .NET. I love C#, it's a very decent blend between a whole lot of languages and additions of LINQ and async/await kept it relevant. Visual Studio is the best IDE I've worked with, not because it's such a good editor but because it has a sane debugger that is actually helpful. I still wouldn't run my startup on .NET though, for a number of reasons. Mono simply isn't there yet. Code that works fine on Windows mysteriously stops working on Mono due to threading or GC vagaries (yes, even in the latest version). This isn't a dealbreaker, but it is pretty annoying especially since debugging these kinds of problems are of precisely the kind that I don't want to debug. The ecosystem is really quite poor compared to, say, JVM or Node. For all the faults of either, there is a LOT of stuff going on and there is a LOT of innovation that is sorely lacking from the .NET world. .NET usually catches up eventually but it's either late or half-hearted (just look at the progress of NHibernate vs. Hibernate). I think ASP.NET vNext is a step in a very good direction and I hope to be able to change my opinion sometime next year.

darylteo 12y ago
> NHibernate vs. Hibernate As a counter argument to that (specifically), we don't really need NHibernate when we have Entity Framework.
- royjacobs 12y ago
  When you start from scratch I'd agree with you, but if you want to interface with a legacy database and you need some more esoteric mappings and user-defined types then I'm not sure how happy you'd be with EF.
- steviee 12y ago
  As a counter-counter point: You absolutely need NHibernate (or something else) when you use EF. Steviee
  - beauzero 12y ago
    The proof is in Orchard CMS.

billpg 12y ago

I'm getting a 404 error. Is there a cached copy out there? EDIT: The blog's front page has a full copy of the article at the top. (As I write this at least.)

dtech 12y ago
But it still being DoS'ed by HN traffic. Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sirchristian.net/blog/2014/06/21/unapologetically-build-your-startup-technology-in-c-net/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Htsthbjig 12y ago

I always wondered why computer languages and economy becomes religion and dogma. We use multiple languages and multiple OS in my company. When you have a company you have your own interest and your customers interest in mind. Some times those interest are not the same of Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM or Oracle. Just developing on a single proprietary language from a single company on a single OS (and yes I know Mono and I don't have a good opinion on it) is a huge red flag for me. We use whatever is necessary for solving our customers problems. Some times it means using C#, most most of the times we use better alternatives.

steviee 12y ago
I agree. My experience (and please tell me when I'm wrong) is that Windows developers for the most part stick to their choice of framework while multi-OS (Windows included) developers are more open to the wonders of the world. So statistically the .NET guys may be more narrow-minded regarding development stacks. Steviee
- darylteo 12y ago
  > So statistically the .NET guys may be more narrow-minded regarding development stacks. While true, .net developers don't need to venture out very far, I don't believe its solely because of narrow-mindedness (sure you'll find these developers everywhere, I can argue that node developers are narrow minded with node + express + mongo for example... hell people still write PHP =) ). With .NET the reality is that there is no reason to consider anything else within the stack. Everything is standard, and most companies have them as part of MSDN. Majority of established .net enterprise environments use SQL Server with either ASP.NET webforms or MVC.net running on IIS + Win Server. What open source considers "vendor lock-in" is considered "standardised technology" in enterprise environments. When considering client work the first question is: "right what do you need to do?" and not "right, what stack are you using". With Java, one client I have to learn Struts, another client I have to learn Play, then another client I have to learn JEE. I know Gradle in and out, but another contract requires me to know Maven, while another contract requires me to know Ant. Standalone server? Or Tomcat / Apache / WebSphere? With Node, everyone has their own templating language (Jade or Handlebars or other). Some use CoffeeScript over plain Javascript. Some use SASS/LESS/ or just plain CSS. Some forward proxy using Haproxy, others NginX. The point is: while the .net stack is pretty narrow, we know it works in the majority of use cases. And that's usually enough.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

The throwaway comment is this: who cares about backends? Go make something people want. Every second you spend chatting tech is wasting your time. Make something people want even if you have to do it with a pencil and paper. Worry about the tech when you've figured out step one. 99% of startups don't do this. So for all of the armchair startup warriors out there, the guys eager to hear if Facebook is really running MongoDB or what their sharding plan looks like, let's look at the tech. I'm a MS hound from way back. I made a bet -- a very good one -- back in the 90s that MS was going to own the PC market. And it did. And life was good. Microsoft sold tools and apps, I came in and programmed using those tools and apps. Many times I came in after the local yokels had already screwed things up. This meant a higher bill rate. Life was nice. But I started noticing something: there was a certain arrogant-jerk-inbred-echo-chamber feeling to the MS community. MS pimped tools to the developers. Developers ate it up. MS pimped new servers to their MVPs. The MVPs sold them to corporations, consultants came in and collected. It was all fine and dandy, but over time there just got to be more and more tools and apps, and more and more servers and experts. Any small reasonable thing you'd like to do, like set up an email server, involved books, certifications, special servers, learning the acquisition history of all these small companies, and so on. It was ludicrous that any one person could be an expert enough to maintain the small set of tools that most folks would need. Microsoft was adding complexity -- unneeded complexity -- into everything it touched. More troubling, once I started learning more about startups, I saw developers obsess over new Microsoft tools or third-party components instead of making things people wanted. Microsoft's interests was in creating and maintaining this ecosystem of selling servers and tools, not in helping people make things other people want. So I'd see these projects that were supposed to be solving a simple problem. They'd use all kinds of fat, bloated, feature-laden junk strung together in a huge pile of tech. Then somebody would start down the "happy path" of making a "hello world " app work. Very soon, however, developers ventured off the happy path, and then they had to learn javascript, html, SMTP, SQL, and so on. So development consisted of salivating over new stuff, eagerly installing it, and then wandering around in the weeds trying to hook all the pieces together. And oh, by the way, the user was supposed to like it. But, let's face it, screw the user. We're here for the tech, right? I still love the CLR and several other things Microsoft has created. But I'm not part of the ecosystem any more, and I won't spend any time at all learning whatever new version of Silverlight they'll have out next year. I'll also stick to my command line and bash, thank you very much. I've been burned too many times, and I've seen too many development teams destroy their productivity by getting lost in the Microsoft ecosystem.

resca79 12y ago

IMHO the problem in not a programming language choice, but the entire ecosystem that you should support if you will use microsoft. Today for ex. linode and digital ocean have a very cheap entry price around 5$, with the power of entire open source lib, and the power of the community of every open source project.

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againBlahbl4h 12y ago

Its weird that the HN crowd just seems to assume that the advice to use linux and mono just has to be a better idea than using windows. If you haven't looked at windows since 2003 you really need to take a look at server 2012 R2. The default installation mode is server core. It requires dramatically fewer patches. Management with PowerShell is incredibly powerful. IIS has seen many, many improvements. Also, "developing your app for azure" is a weird statement. If you develop for Azure Websites you are literally just writing an asp.net web app or api. it runs in IIS in a VM. It just has some management wrapped around it so that you don't have to take care of the VM(s). It has autscale, monitoring, and all the stuff you would expect from a cloud provider. Writing your app to use SQL Azure, or Azure storage, or something like that is just like using the comparable services from Amazon. It's like anything else...you should implement its usage as an interface so you can swap it out if need be. Some people on HN have accused me of working for MS just because I use their stuff. I'm not, nor have I ever been, a MS employee. I'll admit that I started looking into windows a couple of years ago because I was bored with Linux and Unix. I've found that if you put the time in to understand how it works its incredibly productive and thorough. If you try to make it work like unix it will suck. If you learn PowerShell and stay away from the "clickety-clickety" thing it's awesome. From a development standpoint I actually like the total stack approach...but that's me. If you need to use best of breed components you can still do that with .Net. For me though, my interests shifted to C++ a while ago, so .Net stuff for web api's get's the work done when I have to do it. I would like to see more stuff like openstack in the .net world, but system center is fine. The stuff that I do ends up being important enough for enterprises that getting funds for that kind of thing is just part of the package. That's another thing. I'm completely uninterested in startups. I've worked at startups in various roles in the past and I'm just over it. Any startup that I built would have to be something that I could run by myself that immediately made money that I would keep. Investment funding is shit. It's a hassle that is super crazy. Dealing with "business" types that aren't technical enough to understand the challenges is also completely off the table. If you did choose to work with a VC then it's much better to be making money and talking about selling out totally instead of implanting them in your life. Shudder. The one thing that I think Windows needs is a container style app deployment model. The coolest thing going in large scale app building is CoreOS. Its the future of how a large scale app will be built and deployed. The new, and much loathed, metro applications are actually a good starting place for building a container system. They use feature called "app containers" that was first introduced in Vista. Add to that an app package that installs and uninstalls as a unit, called APPX. They haven't made any noise about using the new app model for servers, but it would be a great idea. It uses an API monitor that stops calls to things like LoadLibrary or GetProcAddress and all the other API's that let you bootstrap malware. Anyway, like I said, they haven't made any noise about it...it would be cool though.

nikon 12y ago

Man, 6 months ago I would have agreed with you. Hell I even have a year old BizSpark membership. I just couldn't get over the thought in the back of my head that I'm making the wrong decision investing in Microsoft's development platform. C# is literally my favorite language, but I felt trapped and missed open source... Both the freedom it brings and the community. Maybe I spend too much time on HN. I even tried to go 'indie' .NET. I moved to RavenDB (fuck MSSQL and it's overpricedness, and EF) and stuck with Azure, so really my only costs after my 3 years would be an MSDN license per developer. But in the end I just gave in to my worries. One weekend I just rewrote the damn thing in NodeJS and I'm pretty happy. No need to boot up my Windows VM anymore either. I think the talent pool is also what put me off. There seems to be - in London at least - a lot of career developers who pick .NET.

daigoba66 12y ago

So here is my take: I'm currently working on a SaaS product built on .NET running on Windows Server, IIS, and SQL Server. We're not really a "startup" anymore, but we're still very small. I wasn't here when the first version of the product was built so I wasn't part of that decision. If I were building this product from scratch today as a money-poor startup, I would probably go with tech stack included Java or Python and PostgreSQL. The primary motivation being cost (as in money). Each developer is technically required to have an MSDN/VS Pro license (renews for just under $1000 per year). This is not very expensive if you're generating revenue, but if bootstrapping it is not cheap. You could cheat and just share a single license; you definitely won't get caught. Windows Server licenses, compared to other datacenter costs, are relatively inexpensive. Windows Server has a few advantages; particularly in it's easy to administer and there are plenty of sysadmins out there than know it well. The elephant in the room, at least for a SaaS product, is SQL Server. The features of Enterprise Edition are so compelling for SaaS (HADR, unlimited RAM, online index operations, compression, and encryption) that it's practically a requirement. But this will quickly become one of the most expensive costs in your datacenter. But in my experience, SQL Server has some real advantages that I haven't yet discovered for PostgreSQL. The "community" around SQL Server is huge and has a ton of great people who love to help (often for free!). For instance check out http://brentozar.com http://brentozar.com or http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic/ http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic/. There are programs like Bizspark which can bring the initial software license investment down to nearly $0. But if you're not generating significant revenue after three years, the licensing costs could hurt. So like everything in world, it depends. But the bottom line is that, in my opinion, if you're bootstrapping then costs matter and Microsoft products (SQL Server in particular) are a huge cost which have real viable alternatives.

penguat 12y ago
new VS subscription licences don't seem to be well publicised, but I'm pretty sure that $1000 could be cut down: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-gb/products/visual-studio-online-professional-vs http://www.visualstudio.com/en-gb/products/visual-studio-onl... - Assuming I'm reading it correctly.
- 12y ago

raphinou 12y ago

Not saying it is the case here, but blogs praising ms tech always raise some flags with me, as with http://www.pcworld.com/article/2365060/microsoft-caught-astroturfing-bloggers-again-to-promote-internet-explorer.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2365060/microsoft-caught-astr...

zargath 12y ago

running 30+ windows servers Microsoft has become much better, but still not sexy. Don't ever think they can fix everything for you, find out what they do well and what suxx and then do workarounds. Still too much microsoft and too little webstandards. They upgrade more and fix more bugs, but this also break more stuff. Asp.MVC upgrades can be a pain.. .Net Core, C#, Linq, etc.. all very cool. Can make some stuff that performs very well, but can be very tricky to scale. Asp.net i still too slow and too heavy.. taking >1min to start a asp.mvc site? It feels like some old grandpa compared to Node.js, Go and even PHP. Powershell is still behind Window Server administration can be very slow, .. how can it take 30seconds to draw an Event log ? Really miss ssh or even telnet. Windows Services and schedules can be a pain. How can "access denied let the service run forever without notification??" The license system is crap, they make their costumers feel stupid when they cant figure out how to renew they Action Pack's, etc.. And their crappy sales ppl, trying to push Sharepoint because they hear the word software and web. So I really regret working with microsoft, althought I like some of .Net and C#, but what does one do for a good project and a salery. Next project will not be .net for sure..

CmonDev 12y ago
>> "Node.js" If you need an HTTP Reactor pattern implementation in .NET, there is one coming soon. Patterns are not hot or old, they are just different for different needs.

perltricks 12y ago

I use C# for work and it is a nice language to work with. However mono runs dog-slow compared to C# and is practically unusable. So you are locked in.

knocte 12y ago
> However mono runs dog-slow compared to C# and is practically unusable Did you file a bug about this? What version of Mono were you using?

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brandonhsiao 12y ago

the article seems to be saying C# is cheap and fast because it has a really good set of libraries. i have no problem believing this. the question in a startup is, is it more important to have good libraries or a powerful language? e.g. lisp is the most powerful language, but its library ecosystem isn't reliable enough. whereas java is a weak language but has great libraries. (that's why clojure's awesome!) i'm not trying to start any kind of religious war here, but this is personally why i (and i suspect many others) code their web apps in python. it's a reasonably powerful language with an excellent set of libraries to go with it.

dnesteruk 12y ago

Another equally potent idea is to build products which integrate with Microsoft's own, popular products. For example, the popularity of Excel caused me to build this: http://activemesa.com/x2c http://activemesa.com/x2c

marvin 12y ago

I did my Masters thesis in Computer Science in C# (data visualization). No apologies. A couple of people around the Institute have looked at me funny, but it's turned out to be a very good choice.

dexterchief 12y ago

By all means, unapologetically build your startup with C#/.NET. Every Linux/OSS based startup you will be competing with agrees with this recommendation.

DonnyV 12y ago

I'm currently working on my own startup. But didn't go the full Microsoft stack route. I use C# and Visual Studio for development. I think right now nothing beats VS for pure production output. I do all development on a Windows box. All frameworks work on Windows and Linux. Nancyfx - web framework Cassette - asset optimization Mongodb - database Production server uses Ubuntu + Mono + Nginx. $20 VM on Digital Ocean. Provides a nice balance of best of bread tooling and cheap production costs.

wdr1 12y ago

I had a hard time getting past: > In reality Microsoft doesn’t want your money until you can afford to give it to them. Building your business on that premise seems very dubious at best.