10 ms·

Ask HN: Who is using the .NET stack for their startup?

105 points by nirajs 12y ago

Who is using c# or f# for their startup? I am compiling a list of startups using .net stack. I would appreciate your help.

siganakis 12y ago
We (msgooroo.com) use the .Net stack on Azure and have found it to be quite good. We have even been experimenting with the new vNext / OWIN stack which appears even better and will give us the flexibility to run on Linux. Azure is a bit hit and miss. Its brilliant for getting something up an running quickly (using websites / SQL Server), but is a little flaky at scale. Key problems include connection issues with SQL Server, connection issues with their hosted Redis service, pricing of SQL Server when using advanced features like geo-replication. All in all though, its a pretty good development experience once you get your head around the fact that in the cloud services fail and there is nothing you can do about it except plan for it. Oh and the Bizspark program they have gives you $100 worth of free hosting on Azure which is always nice.
- taspeotis 12y ago
  > Key problems include connection issues with SQL Server, What sort? If it's intermediate connection problems .NET 4.5.1 added Connection Resiliency to ADO.NET [1]. If you're using a recent enough version of Entity Framework it goes even further [2]. [1] http://dpaoliello.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/connection-resiliency-in-ado-net-2/ http://dpaoliello.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/connection-resili... [2] http://thedatafarm.com/data-access/ef6-connection-resiliency-for-sql-azure-when-does-it-actually-do-its-thing/ http://thedatafarm.com/data-access/ef6-connection-resiliency...
  - ghuntley 12y ago
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/dn456835.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/dn456835.aspx public class MyConfiguration : DbConfiguration { public MyConfiguration() { SetExecutionStrategy( "System.Data.SqlClient", () => new SqlAzureExecutionStrategy(1, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30))); } } The above SqlAzureExecutionStrategy will retry instantly the first time a transient failure occurs, but will delay longer between each retry until either the max retry limit is exceeded or the total time hits the max delay. The execution strategies will only retry a limited number of exceptions that are usually tansient, you will still need to handle other errors as well as catching the RetryLimitExceeded exception for the case where an error is not transient or takes too long to resolve itself.
  - siganakis 12y ago
    Yeah, we use .Net 4.5.3, without EF. Connections still fail all the time especially under high demand. We have our own retry logic, which also logs the issue so we are aware of how frequently errors occur while a command / transaction is being executed. This is using SQL Azure with the "Business" tier, so it will be interesting to see how the new (much more highly priced tiers) Standard and Premium tiers go.
ayrx 12y ago
Stack Exchange is a .NET shop as well.
- ooOOoo 12y ago
  For details, see http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-and-technologies-are-used-to-build-the-stack-exchange-network http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...
webwright 12y ago
Everymove in Seattle is, I believe. https://everymove.org/ https://everymove.org/
dazbradbury 12y ago
We use .Net MVC (C#) at OpenRent [1]. Might be worth checking out bizspark [2], as I know it lists lots of startups that are using a .net stack. Also probably worth mentioning what you're compiling the list for if you want more responses from HN users... More info: We actually don't host on Azure (Web Sites not flexible enough for us), but use a mixture of AppHarbor [3] (awesome product and team), and various Amazon web services. [1] - https://www.openrent.co.uk https://www.openrent.co.uk [2]http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/partners/startups.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/partners/startups.aspx [3] - https://appharbor.com https://appharbor.com
- vyrotek 12y ago
  "Web Sites not flexible enough for us" Would you care to share any specifics? I'm curious to know what you're trying to do that doesn't work on Azure.
  - dazbradbury 12y ago
    The issues were all "Web Sites" specific. I'm sure we could spin up machines and get everything to run - but that's much less enticing compared to AppHarbor / Beanstalk. One example - if you have any processing in the application_startup, Web Sites won't work for you. Applications are randomly killed and restarted, and don't allow for a startup time, meaning outages when this happens. Customer support suggested using a fail over to work around this, but the fail over only kicks in once your app has been down for a certain amount of time - so you'll still have down time.
    - ghuntley 12y ago
      Push your AppStartup processing into a background worker? a) https://github.com/HangfireIO/Hangfire https://github.com/HangfireIO/Hangfire b) http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-create-web-jobs/ http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-...
      - dazbradbury 12y ago
Mandatum 12y ago
Planning to launch a SaaS product full .NET stack running on Azure, BizSpark gives you almost a year of free server time ($3700 worth, 9 months worth of their biggest single VM uptime). It's hard to say no when they give you so much free stuff for a startup-style business.
- Oculus 12y ago
  It's actually pretty easy once you realize that you have to pay for the licences on all Microsoft technologies once BizSpark ends. It gives just enough time to be too locked in to easily adopt a different technology stack.
  - hayksaakian 12y ago
    can you run linux VMs on azure? i think so. free servers are free servers.
    - cpayne 12y ago
      Microsoft have gone out of their way to support everything! http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-linux-endorsed-distributions/ http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virt... http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#Linux http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-mac...
  - yuhong 12y ago
    I think they did an offer to change this later.
  - taspeotis 12y ago
    > It's actually pretty easy once you realize that you have to pay for the licences on all Microsoft technologies once BizSpark ends For the most part, the stuff that runs on Azure doesn't have a discrete licensing cost. You pay the hourly rate for the resource.
woohoo7676 12y ago
I'm using ASP MVC 5 with Knockout.js, hosted in Azure, for my startup (commuting.io, still in dev). I've come from a .net background, so it seemed like the easiest choice to get up and running. Also using SQL Azure and Redis for data storage/caching - it's been mostly positive so far. The downside with Azure has been the portal/management experience. The current UI is somewhat sluggish and disorganized, and the new portal tile UI is extremely confusing to navigate. Overall it's been a pretty pleasant experience (maybe minus dealing with web.config files).
- vyrotek 12y ago
  the new portal tile UI is extremely confusing to navigate. Seriously. I don't know what they were thinking. I don't mind the current portal. It does take seem sluggish with all the ajax/loading but at least I know where everything is. The new portal needs to be completely redone.
photon137 12y ago
Using a cluster of Owin (self-hosted) servers with NancyFx on Mono to host REST APIs behind nginx for a distributed-computing solution on AWS. Also use EntityFramework on Npgsql+postgres - experience has been positive. Only downside is that for something like a customer-facing portal, the identity-management is tied to Windows-specific features, for now - so have had to build a custom solution for this that runs on Linux. Waiting for ASP .NET vNext and its Identity solution when it becomes slightly more mature. EDIT: Also evaluating a move to Azure. Primary driver (for choosing the .net stack) has been prior experience with C#, .NET and Visual Studio
arlattimore 12y ago
Octopus Deploy [1], which is automated deployment software primarily for deploying .NET applications is written in .NET. For those that have commented about using Azure in their start-ups, you can use Octopus Deploy for that also. [1] https://octopusdeploy.com https://octopusdeploy.com
profquail 12y ago
I know of at least two startups who're heavily using F#: http://tachyus.com/ http://tachyus.com/ http://jet.com/ http://jet.com/ There are others as well (I just don't recall their names right now) -- take a look on http://fsharp.org http://fsharp.org for more links.
math 12y ago
we use it extensively at http://www.backrecord.com http://www.backrecord.com (C#, mono)
zeeshanm 12y ago
ZocDoc in NYC uses C#/.NET stack.
kimura 12y ago
At http://www.listmax.ca http://www.listmax.ca we use .NET for our backend api and various other tasks. Plentyoffish ran .NET stack on one machine for a very long time.
thnetcoder 12y ago
I use the .net stack for every project. http://pitsolutions.io/ http://pitsolutions.io/ All .net/sql server, jquery on the front end with websockets.
santoriv 12y ago
We are using .Net MVC with C#/Typescript at Makemake.io (still in dev) on Azure. The biggest benefit for our project is Visual Studio and Resharper's Typescript support - it's really helpful for writing big Typescript apps (right now we have 400+ Typescript files in our SPA). Bizspark is also great! $150 per month of free credit really helps - especially at the early stages.
- zerr 12y ago
  What frameworks/libs you use in TypeScript?
  - santoriv 12y ago
    Ember, Pixi, When, jQuery. That's pretty much it. All of them have type definitions (although some are a bit out of date/inaccurate).
carsongross 12y ago
Xero is built on the .NET stack. Per Craig Walker (CTO): https://www.xero.com/blog/2011/03/why-we-hire-any-kind-of-programmer/ "Xero is a .NET shop."
graycat 12y ago
We are using Windows, the .NET Framework, IIS, ASP.NET, and Visual Basic .NET. We're on the .NET Framework 4.0 and see no reason to move to 4.5. For C#, not interested: The syntax borrows from the deliberately idiosyncratic syntax of C, and the Visual Basic syntax is more verbose, easier to learn, teach, and read, and, thus, less error prone, is as a programming language in its semantics, features, and functionality essentially equivalent to C#, that is, the difference is mostly just syntactic sugar, and apparently is about as good as C# or anything else at getting at the CLR and the .NET Framework. For F#, people back to Backus have been working on functional programming, and, for more than just curiosity, and certainly for the work of our start-up, we're not impressed or interested, in that or logic programming, rule-based programming, or standing on our heads in the corner programming, etc. -- sorry 'bout that; we can agree to disagree, and YMMV. We're quite pleased with Visual Basic .NET. A hat tip to the Microsoft Visual Basic group. Main gripe: For the documentation, actually for all the documentation on MSDN, especially for SQL Server, please, please, please, get a least a C in technical writing 101. Our biggest problem in our start-up, far and away, much, much, much more difficult than everything else combined, literally, is the low quality of the technical writing at MSDN. For JavaScript, Microsoft's ASP.NET writes some for us, but so far we have yet to write a single line of it and will delay doing so as long as we can, hopefully forever. For ASP.NET, we are using just the basics, that is, with Sub Page_Init Sub Page_Load Sub Page_PreRender Sub Page_Unload etc. We have heard of MVC, looked at it a little, can see no reason for it or advantage in it, and intend to have nothing to do with it. Maybe better technical writing at MSDN would let us take MVC more seriously. We type into our favorite text editor and make no use of an IDE nor do we want to. For developing code for Web pages, ASP.NET and Visual Basic work nicely together -- it works fine. Actually, it's nice. For a session state store, we wrote our own using just instances of one class, de/serialization, TCP/IP raw sockets, and two collection classes. On an 8 core processor at 4.0 GHz, our session state store should be good for 11,000+ transactions a second; transactions is appropriate because the code is single threaded. Yes, on an 8 core processor we would run several instances with sharding. As we go live, our server will be just a single full tower case with an 8 core processor, 32 GB of main memory, some SSDs for a special purpose particular to our start-up, and some disks, with Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS, ASP.NET, our Web pages, our session state store, and some specialized back-end servers. The software and architecture are scalable via just simple sharding. We have little or no intention of using the cloud soon or ever. As we go live and grow, after the issue of the MSDN documentation, no doubt, and closely related to the documentation issue, our biggest concern will be Windows Server, SQL Server, and IIS installation, configuration, updates, security, monitoring, management, performance, administration, reliability, backup, and recovery -- little things like those. But from some of the just astounding successes Microsoft has running server farms with their software, clearly terrific results are possible; maybe we will be calling for some high end technical support. That's what we are doing!
vyrotek 12y ago
http://iactionable.com http://iactionable.com is a .NET/C# start-up. We're completely hosted in Windows Azure as well. We also went through the Microsoft BizSpark program which is amazing and I highly recommend it.
michaelsbradley 12y ago
Any .NET folks making use of ClojureCLR? https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr
- grayrest 12y ago
  Survey says probably not: https://cognitect.wufoo.com/reports/state-of-clojure-2014-results/ https://cognitect.wufoo.com/reports/state-of-clojure-2014-re... There was an announcement of Clojure in Unity3d [1] a couple weeks ago which is ClojureCLR. https://github.com/arcadia-unity/Arcadia https://github.com/arcadia-unity/Arcadia
orlandpm 12y ago
At Tachyus (http://tachyus.com http://tachyus.com) we have made a huge bet on F#, and it has paid off in spades. The back end of our SaaS product is 99%+ F#, and so far we have had a great experience using Azure for hosting. Our iOS apps are also built using 99%+ F# (using Xamarin, on Mono rather than .Net). The language allows us to write highly expressive code, and fewer lines of code overall. Using a Microsoft language has given us huge productivity benefits (most notably Visual Studio and Azure support). There is a fantastic F# community (http://fsharp.org http://fsharp.org) which is untethered to Microsoft, and it's exciting to see the language grow as an open-source and cross-platform tool.
- jchonphoenix 12y ago
  How does this compare to OCaml or Haskell? Most of the "benefits" you've mentioned here aren't actually benefits, but par the course for a programming language no matter what stack you choose. Visual Studio seems to be the only real benefit I'm seeing (and I agree, it's a very major benefit).
  - logicchains 12y ago
    Compared to OCaml, F# has slightly nicer syntax, real multi-threading, and type providers (can e.g. automatically generate a type from a database schema). It lacks OCaml's awesome module system, higher-kinded polymorphism, OCaml's neat but rarely-used object system (it has C#'s object system hacked on instead), and on Mono at least it is generally slightly slower than OCaml. In my view the .net libaries are probably the biggest advantage over OCaml and Haskell. Similar to how access to Java libraries gives Clojure an advantage over lisps like Common Lisp and Racket. Oh, and if you want to use Windows without mingw then F# is a far better choice than OCaml or Haskell. The OCaml packaged manager doesn't even work properly on Windows, as far as I'm aware.
    - _random_ 12y ago
      Also it seems new versions of F# are released much more often than those of OCAML. Corporate backing is important.
cpayne 12y ago
https://www.moneysoft.com.au https://www.moneysoft.com.au - is a running on C# & SQL Server , hosted on our own servers. And https://www.calendartree.com/ https://www.calendartree.com/ (startup by Dilbert's Scott Adams + others) are C# / SQL site, on their own servers.
- quink 12y ago
  Anyone else getting ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID?
  - pope13 12y ago
    Not getting the exact error, but the cert that https://www.moneysoft.com.au https://www.moneysoft.com.au is using is not actually for https://www.moneysoft.com.au https://www.moneysoft.com.au.
    - cpayne 12y ago
      Sorry, getting our app and website mixed up. Website: http://www.moneysoft.com.au/ http://www.moneysoft.com.au/ App: https://secure.moneysoft.com.au/ https://secure.moneysoft.com.au/
architgupta 12y ago
ClearTax -- cleartax.in uses the .net stack. We use F# and C#.
RobotCaleb 12y ago
What are you doing with this list?
- nirajs 12y ago
  Thanks. Basically, creating a network of startup folks to help each other with tools and ideas. Job board to find talents. We also make https://dotnetfiddle.net/ https://dotnetfiddle.net/ to collaborate, help educate all things .net
frugalmail 12y ago
Would love to see responses from the same users when the bizspark period is over. Seems like an idiotic choice to go vendor lock-in, small community, IMO sheltered mentality, high license fees (after bizspark), and difficult to automate operating systems. I suppose if you don't need a lot of machines it's not a problem yet, but seems like a lot of short sighted decisions.
- jasonkester 12y ago
  I run S3stat and Twiddla on the .net stack and my BizSpark term has passed. It was in no way a big deal. Yeah, servers cost money to provision. But then servers always cost money to provision regardless of your stack. Even with license fees, the MS stack wins for me because my entire server farm fits on three boxes instead of the twelve I'd need to get the same firepower on a typical rails stack. The extra few thousand in full price server licenses is just noise because really, we're talking about a business here, not a hobby. The bottom line is that if your business is going to fail because of a single $5,000 invoice, it's debatable whether it was ever a business to start with. The whole reason we all build SaaS businesses in the first place is the 95%+ profit margins. Fretting about what happens within that 5% that makes up the expense column seems a bit silly. Even without BizSpark, I bet I'll build the next product on the same stack. The math just plain works out.
taspeotis 12y ago
The project I work on isn't a startup per se but it's not completely dissimilar. We use: * ASP.NET for web with SQL Server + EF for the database and data access * Xamarin for mobile and OData for data access (back to our ASP.NET sites) The CLR is great because it's always been fast enough for our applications and every so often you get something for nothing. For example, CLR 4.5 brought better GC and RyuJIT is bringing better code generation. NET Native might give us even better performance. LINQ is amazing if you know your IQueryables from your IEnumerables and the difference between an Expression<Func<T, bool>> and a Func<T, bool>. Hosted in a private datacentre, not using Azure but we've got our eye on it (provisioning resources in the Azure Portal seems to get easier and easier than doing it ourselves). New Relic for monitoring the web sites. My biggest gripe (and it's not that big) is that within the Microsoft ecosystem/community everything works great but once you go outside it things are less well supported. Some less-popular-but-wow-that's-useful Javascript libraries don't come as NuGet packages. New Relic's .NET monitoring seems good but second fiddle to their other stuff. After that I'd say Xamarin is letting the team down. Every second or so release of theirs fixes two bugs but adds another one. Keeping an eye on Application Insights. It looks like it integrates nicely with Visual Studio Online, and VSO/TFS actually looks quite nice in parts (e.g. Bamboo for CI is largely geared towards Java apps not .NET but TFS' Release Management looks promising). I have my eye on VSO/TFS too but right now it looks like pros do not outweight the cons vs. our Atlassian applications. If you've got enough processing power and memory and a fast SSD to run Visual Studio + ReSharper it's coding heaven.
- us0r 12y ago
  "Keeping an eye on Application Insights." I love AI. I hate that they don't even provide a clue to what the pricing model for this will be though.
- _random_ 12y ago
  > "Some less-popular-but-wow-that's-useful Javascript libraries don't come as NuGet packages" The good will become perfect soon enough: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingGulpGruntBowerAndNpmSupportForVisualStudio.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingGulpGruntBowerAndNp...
benhamner 12y ago
We use C# and F# extensively at Kaggle: kaggle.com is an ASP.NET MVC app on Azure, and a good portion of our data processing is in C# or F#.
skrebbel 12y ago
At Izooble (http://www.izooble.com http://www.izooble.com - social product recommendation site), our entire backend is written in C#. We use ServiceStack (v3, which is still free) for our API, PostgreSQL for data. We host it all on Mono and Docker on Linux VPSs. We wanted Docker because we wanted PaaS-like deployment but not vendor lock in. Our team uses Linux, Windows and OSX to work on it. MonoDevelop is a pretty decent tool, on some areas actually better than VS. We're really happy about the choice. C# is a great language, NuGet beats pip and gem by miles (none of that virtualenv bull). If Mono support is a requirement from the set-out, you don't run into many compat problems.
- aleem 12y ago
  I really like that stack primarily because it couples c# with an open stack. Could you share a bit more about the web server setup and how you came to choose this stack?
  - skrebbel 12y ago
    Came to choose: It was the only language that doesn't suck that the entire initial team had some to much experience with. About the open stack, seemed obvious to me - why knowingly lock yourself in? BizSpark is nice, and we're members, but not every startup takes off as fast as Slack and for a struggling company, licenses might be prohibitive. Server setup: We have 6 docker containers: Postgres, backend, nginx, assets, data and ssh. Backend is a ubuntu+mono+backend_code. Data is the docker data container pattern. Assets is the frontend code (we're an SLA). Ssh is an sshd for looking at the data and logs in the data container. Nginx and backend talk via fastcgi, one of ServiceStack's apphosts. Currently it's all on one server, but the code is prepared for scaling and load balancing.
- xtrumanx 12y ago
  Like aleem, I'd also love to hear more. Perhaps a post on the company blog. It would make great reading here on HN. The community gets to hear about a C#+Postgres+Mono+Docker stack and maybe you'll get some new users for your app or bright people making job inquiries. At the very least, increase brand awareness. Just don't forget; the company logo on the blog page should link to the app, not the blog.
redact207 12y ago
Our tech stack at Entomic (www.entomic.com) is all done in .NET. We've got a pretty common stack (at least we think so) - MVC5, WebAPI, SignalR running on Azure web and storage. Like others here who get set up on a MS stack, everything integrates very easily. Visual Studio IMO is still one of the best IDEs out there for what it does, and having that supported by a good CI system means very little is left to do except code.
Lelala 12y ago
At Lelala (https://www.lelala.de https://www.lelala.de), the MS stack with the typical layers is used: - IIS + ASP MVC - MSSQL (via ORM layer) - bunch of .NET/C# tools & stuff to support the main system Since it was asked what happens if the BizSpark period is over, let me state on detail about the model: In BizSpark, its true that you go vendor lock in as long as you are building strict dependency on their platform, lets say if you use EF for accessing SQL, you may have a problem in the long run. But: Even if you've left BizSpark, a MS Server License is to be paid once? (not per year, not every two years etc.) I do not understand where the myth comes from that one has to pay every year or continuously to use MS licenses? The math is simple: A W2K12 Standard server license costs around 850 USD (~ 700 EUR) - once - even if Opensource would is cheaper in term of license costs, a software running 24/7 for a one-time payment of 700 EUR isn't that expensive. Now, it comes down to scale up or scale out: - in the one scenario, because of no costs you can scale massivley out, going from one machine to n machines - but if you ever tried to administrate your machine park lonely(!!) if it counts 5+ machines (while you have to develop/maintain & run the app itself, too!), some may consider to hire a network admin (which is a fixed salary per year which usually outweighs the costs of your MS Server license) The reason why C# is used, is simple (and was stated above): - C# and .NET are very convenient and mature environments to write apps in - C# is considered by me as a beautiful language, i really like it (coming from x years of "C-styled-syntax-languages" could make me somehwat biased ;-) Instead of the licensing costs of MS products, i see much more important difficulties in the mid- to long-run future if someone built on it: MS maybe not survive the upcoming decade because of huge market shifts; then, in 10 years, it may be a problem if you will not get any support because the company maybe no more existing. God thanks, the next version of ASP MVC has a VM for *nix-derivatives, so you could solve this issue by running your app on a Linux-box. (And if you then have built your app additionally on a top of an ORM, you won't have any issues)
- Lelala 12y ago
  P.S.: i forgot: Jeff Atwood made a GREAT comparison on up-vs-out-scaling some years ago: http://blog.codinghorror.com/scaling-up-vs-scaling-out-hidden-costs/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/scaling-up-vs-scaling-out-hidde...
- andrea_s 12y ago
everettForth 12y ago
The question reminded me of this classic: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-and-the-importance-of-being-stupid/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-...
Permit 12y ago
We're using it at Code Connect (http://codeconnect.io http://codeconnect.io). We build a plugin for Visual Studio, so there's not exactly a lot of choice. :) Personally, I've always enjoyed C#, so it's been a pretty positive experience on the whole.
doobiaus 12y ago
We're a start up using using .NET/C# MVC4 SQL Server etc etc. (Sorry can't give names Just call us "Medical Software"). There are a lot more .NET start-ups than one is lead to believe, but you don't hear so much about them because they're too busy making money to give interviews to TechCrunch ;) Seriously though, they tend to be from developers branching out of existing enterprises & "non-cool" fields and have existing customers or bootstrap funding. With Azure, AWS, Bizspark & MAPSDD cost implications of being on the .NET stack are negligible comparing to the long term savings in maintainability.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
raphinou 12y ago
Honest question: what are the advantages of this choice? I have horrible memories from the time i used microsoft software. Iirc iis had horrible logging, windows administration is not easy to be scripted (is there an ssh server/client by default?), you can be left alone if ms changes course (as has happened in the past), etc I personally feel much safer and efficient by avoiding ms, but curious to learn and hear counter arguments.
- _random_ 12y ago
  You seem to be coming from an admin/ops perspective. From developer's perspective it's two modern mainstream languages - F#, C# - that can be used on Windows, Azure, Mac, iOS, Android, WP as a well-defined workflow. The best IDE - Visual Studio + ReSharper + soon Roslyn. Second best ecosystem of libraries, that is picking up. There are some missing bits that are coming: docker and containers, dynamic compilation (of static typed code) when building web sites. It might not be the best choice in individual "disciplines", but it's the best overall.
- DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  The question was a little ambiguous. "Microsoft Stack" could mean everything from MS, but it could also mean you just pick and choose. I've found the best value/growth combination to be Linux, Mono, and F#. If I need a database I'll use something free or open source. Right now I think folks are making a mistake if they decide to go "all Microsoft" or "no Microsoft". It's much more nuanced than that.
atko 12y ago
We're a startup (https://whoaverse.com https://whoaverse.com) using .NET4.5/C# MVC5 and SQL, currently working on getting set up in Switzerland. C# beauty, Visual Studio and Azure were the key factors why we decided to go with .NET.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
I've been using F# on Mono for all of my startup back-end work over several startup attempts.
WorldWideWayne 12y ago
I'm using Node.js + .NET for my part-time, single founder startup.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
This will be a little off topic since the last time I tried C# and .Net was many years ago (I was getting prepped to write a book on J2EE, and I wanted to spend a week using the competition first, to get a more balanced point of view): I want to praise Microsoft's BizSpark program. I was accepted a few months ago after I submitted my plan for a SaaS product. I am using Ubuntu servers on Azure, and Azure works well - fewer services than AWS, but a comparable developer's experience to AWS and Google's offerings. I definitely recommend looking into BizSpark if you are interesting in developing an SaaS business. Since I am using Linux, Haskell, and Ruby I am not really locked into using Azure, but if my SaaS product is successful, I will probably keep using Azure in gratitude for $150/month of free Azure use for up to 3 years. In general my attitude about Microsoft improved a lot earlier this year after trying their Office 360 product that works on all of my devices (MacBook, iPad, and Android phone). I like the direction the new CEO is taking the company.
fmavituna 12y ago
We are using .NET Stack for our web app scanner. Both for desktop and (https://www.netsparker.com/web-vulnerability-scanner/ https://www.netsparker.com/web-vulnerability-scanner/) and SaaS versions use .NET (https://www.netsparker.com/online-web-application-security-scanner/ https://www.netsparker.com/online-web-application-security-s...) We started with Bizspark as well, now we graduated and license cost is not much really. We also rely on MS stack for many things other than source code repository / CI etc.
dgudkov 12y ago
We use C#/F# for enterprise data processing app. C# for WPF front-end and F# for data processing back-end. F# was a total revelation for me and it has become my favorite programming language.
dmarlow 12y ago
We, at Degreed (https://degreed.com https://degreed.com), are using .NET, MVC 5, EF 6 on Azure. Front-end is Angular. We are part of BizSpark Plus which ends next month. Currently looking into whether or not VS 2013 Express for Web is sufficient. Reason for using it was tooling, hosting and familiarity. I enjoy being able to being able to fully debug the code and step through things. Makes things enjoyable, to say the least. I love C# and use it for everything I do. Only concern is the steep SQL pricing for the new tiers and the occasional blips as mentioned by siganakis. However, support is fast and helpful. Shameless plug: we're hiring. We're distributed/remote between SF, SLC and LA. Ping me for futher details. Disclaimer: former MS dev.
Aaronontheweb 12y ago
We (https://markedup.com/ https://markedup.com/) use C# heavily and do about 20-30k requests per minute on fairly small Elastic Beanstalk / EC2 instances. Mostly ASP.NET MVC, but we also use Akka.NET for a lot of our internal services.
Immortalin 12y ago
Contemplating on whether should I use ASP.Net webforms for my ecommerce site or stick with a no/minimum-coding required solution such as wordpress/drupal

105 points by nirajs 12y ago

Who is using c# or f# for their startup? I am compiling a list of startups using .net stack. I would appreciate your help.

siganakis 12y ago

We (msgooroo.com) use the .Net stack on Azure and have found it to be quite good. We have even been experimenting with the new vNext / OWIN stack which appears even better and will give us the flexibility to run on Linux. Azure is a bit hit and miss. Its brilliant for getting something up an running quickly (using websites / SQL Server), but is a little flaky at scale. Key problems include connection issues with SQL Server, connection issues with their hosted Redis service, pricing of SQL Server when using advanced features like geo-replication. All in all though, its a pretty good development experience once you get your head around the fact that in the cloud services fail and there is nothing you can do about it except plan for it. Oh and the Bizspark program they have gives you $100 worth of free hosting on Azure which is always nice.

taspeotis 12y ago
> Key problems include connection issues with SQL Server, What sort? If it's intermediate connection problems .NET 4.5.1 added Connection Resiliency to ADO.NET [1]. If you're using a recent enough version of Entity Framework it goes even further [2]. [1] http://dpaoliello.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/connection-resiliency-in-ado-net-2/ http://dpaoliello.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/connection-resili... [2] http://thedatafarm.com/data-access/ef6-connection-resiliency-for-sql-azure-when-does-it-actually-do-its-thing/ http://thedatafarm.com/data-access/ef6-connection-resiliency...
- ghuntley 12y ago
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/dn456835.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/dn456835.aspx public class MyConfiguration : DbConfiguration { public MyConfiguration() { SetExecutionStrategy( "System.Data.SqlClient", () => new SqlAzureExecutionStrategy(1, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30))); } } The above SqlAzureExecutionStrategy will retry instantly the first time a transient failure occurs, but will delay longer between each retry until either the max retry limit is exceeded or the total time hits the max delay. The execution strategies will only retry a limited number of exceptions that are usually tansient, you will still need to handle other errors as well as catching the RetryLimitExceeded exception for the case where an error is not transient or takes too long to resolve itself.
- siganakis 12y ago
  Yeah, we use .Net 4.5.3, without EF. Connections still fail all the time especially under high demand. We have our own retry logic, which also logs the issue so we are aware of how frequently errors occur while a command / transaction is being executed. This is using SQL Azure with the "Business" tier, so it will be interesting to see how the new (much more highly priced tiers) Standard and Premium tiers go.

ayrx 12y ago

Stack Exchange is a .NET shop as well.

ooOOoo 12y ago
For details, see http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-and-technologies-are-used-to-build-the-stack-exchange-network http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...

webwright 12y ago

Everymove in Seattle is, I believe. https://everymove.org/ https://everymove.org/

dazbradbury 12y ago

We use .Net MVC (C#) at OpenRent [1]. Might be worth checking out bizspark [2], as I know it lists lots of startups that are using a .net stack. Also probably worth mentioning what you're compiling the list for if you want more responses from HN users... More info: We actually don't host on Azure (Web Sites not flexible enough for us), but use a mixture of AppHarbor [3] (awesome product and team), and various Amazon web services. [1] - https://www.openrent.co.uk https://www.openrent.co.uk [2]http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/partners/startups.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/partners/startups.aspx [3] - https://appharbor.com https://appharbor.com

vyrotek 12y ago
"Web Sites not flexible enough for us" Would you care to share any specifics? I'm curious to know what you're trying to do that doesn't work on Azure.
- dazbradbury 12y ago
  The issues were all "Web Sites" specific. I'm sure we could spin up machines and get everything to run - but that's much less enticing compared to AppHarbor / Beanstalk. One example - if you have any processing in the application_startup, Web Sites won't work for you. Applications are randomly killed and restarted, and don't allow for a startup time, meaning outages when this happens. Customer support suggested using a fail over to work around this, but the fail over only kicks in once your app has been down for a certain amount of time - so you'll still have down time.
  - ghuntley 12y ago
    Push your AppStartup processing into a background worker? a) https://github.com/HangfireIO/Hangfire https://github.com/HangfireIO/Hangfire b) http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-create-web-jobs/ http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-...
    - dazbradbury 12y ago

Mandatum 12y ago

Planning to launch a SaaS product full .NET stack running on Azure, BizSpark gives you almost a year of free server time ($3700 worth, 9 months worth of their biggest single VM uptime). It's hard to say no when they give you so much free stuff for a startup-style business.

Oculus 12y ago
It's actually pretty easy once you realize that you have to pay for the licences on all Microsoft technologies once BizSpark ends. It gives just enough time to be too locked in to easily adopt a different technology stack.
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  can you run linux VMs on azure? i think so. free servers are free servers.
  - cpayne 12y ago
    Microsoft have gone out of their way to support everything! http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-linux-endorsed-distributions/ http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virt... http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#Linux http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-mac...
- yuhong 12y ago
  I think they did an offer to change this later.
- taspeotis 12y ago
  > It's actually pretty easy once you realize that you have to pay for the licences on all Microsoft technologies once BizSpark ends For the most part, the stuff that runs on Azure doesn't have a discrete licensing cost. You pay the hourly rate for the resource.

woohoo7676 12y ago

I'm using ASP MVC 5 with Knockout.js, hosted in Azure, for my startup (commuting.io, still in dev). I've come from a .net background, so it seemed like the easiest choice to get up and running. Also using SQL Azure and Redis for data storage/caching - it's been mostly positive so far. The downside with Azure has been the portal/management experience. The current UI is somewhat sluggish and disorganized, and the new portal tile UI is extremely confusing to navigate. Overall it's been a pretty pleasant experience (maybe minus dealing with web.config files).

vyrotek 12y ago
the new portal tile UI is extremely confusing to navigate. Seriously. I don't know what they were thinking. I don't mind the current portal. It does take seem sluggish with all the ajax/loading but at least I know where everything is. The new portal needs to be completely redone.

photon137 12y ago

Using a cluster of Owin (self-hosted) servers with NancyFx on Mono to host REST APIs behind nginx for a distributed-computing solution on AWS. Also use EntityFramework on Npgsql+postgres - experience has been positive. Only downside is that for something like a customer-facing portal, the identity-management is tied to Windows-specific features, for now - so have had to build a custom solution for this that runs on Linux. Waiting for ASP .NET vNext and its Identity solution when it becomes slightly more mature. EDIT: Also evaluating a move to Azure. Primary driver (for choosing the .net stack) has been prior experience with C#, .NET and Visual Studio

arlattimore 12y ago

Octopus Deploy [1], which is automated deployment software primarily for deploying .NET applications is written in .NET. For those that have commented about using Azure in their start-ups, you can use Octopus Deploy for that also. [1] https://octopusdeploy.com https://octopusdeploy.com

profquail 12y ago

I know of at least two startups who're heavily using F#: http://tachyus.com/ http://tachyus.com/ http://jet.com/ http://jet.com/ There are others as well (I just don't recall their names right now) -- take a look on http://fsharp.org http://fsharp.org for more links.

math 12y ago

we use it extensively at http://www.backrecord.com http://www.backrecord.com (C#, mono)

zeeshanm 12y ago

ZocDoc in NYC uses C#/.NET stack.

kimura 12y ago

At http://www.listmax.ca http://www.listmax.ca we use .NET for our backend api and various other tasks. Plentyoffish ran .NET stack on one machine for a very long time.

thnetcoder 12y ago

I use the .net stack for every project. http://pitsolutions.io/ http://pitsolutions.io/ All .net/sql server, jquery on the front end with websockets.

santoriv 12y ago

We are using .Net MVC with C#/Typescript at Makemake.io (still in dev) on Azure. The biggest benefit for our project is Visual Studio and Resharper's Typescript support - it's really helpful for writing big Typescript apps (right now we have 400+ Typescript files in our SPA). Bizspark is also great! $150 per month of free credit really helps - especially at the early stages.

zerr 12y ago
What frameworks/libs you use in TypeScript?
- santoriv 12y ago
  Ember, Pixi, When, jQuery. That's pretty much it. All of them have type definitions (although some are a bit out of date/inaccurate).

carsongross 12y ago

Xero is built on the .NET stack. Per Craig Walker (CTO): https://www.xero.com/blog/2011/03/why-we-hire-any-kind-of-programmer/ "Xero is a .NET shop."

graycat 12y ago

We are using Windows, the .NET Framework, IIS, ASP.NET, and Visual Basic .NET. We're on the .NET Framework 4.0 and see no reason to move to 4.5. For C#, not interested: The syntax borrows from the deliberately idiosyncratic syntax of C, and the Visual Basic syntax is more verbose, easier to learn, teach, and read, and, thus, less error prone, is as a programming language in its semantics, features, and functionality essentially equivalent to C#, that is, the difference is mostly just syntactic sugar, and apparently is about as good as C# or anything else at getting at the CLR and the .NET Framework. For F#, people back to Backus have been working on functional programming, and, for more than just curiosity, and certainly for the work of our start-up, we're not impressed or interested, in that or logic programming, rule-based programming, or standing on our heads in the corner programming, etc. -- sorry 'bout that; we can agree to disagree, and YMMV. We're quite pleased with Visual Basic .NET. A hat tip to the Microsoft Visual Basic group. Main gripe: For the documentation, actually for all the documentation on MSDN, especially for SQL Server, please, please, please, get a least a C in technical writing 101. Our biggest problem in our start-up, far and away, much, much, much more difficult than everything else combined, literally, is the low quality of the technical writing at MSDN. For JavaScript, Microsoft's ASP.NET writes some for us, but so far we have yet to write a single line of it and will delay doing so as long as we can, hopefully forever. For ASP.NET, we are using just the basics, that is, with Sub Page_Init Sub Page_Load Sub Page_PreRender Sub Page_Unload etc. We have heard of MVC, looked at it a little, can see no reason for it or advantage in it, and intend to have nothing to do with it. Maybe better technical writing at MSDN would let us take MVC more seriously. We type into our favorite text editor and make no use of an IDE nor do we want to. For developing code for Web pages, ASP.NET and Visual Basic work nicely together -- it works fine. Actually, it's nice. For a session state store, we wrote our own using just instances of one class, de/serialization, TCP/IP raw sockets, and two collection classes. On an 8 core processor at 4.0 GHz, our session state store should be good for 11,000+ transactions a second; transactions is appropriate because the code is single threaded. Yes, on an 8 core processor we would run several instances with sharding. As we go live, our server will be just a single full tower case with an 8 core processor, 32 GB of main memory, some SSDs for a special purpose particular to our start-up, and some disks, with Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS, ASP.NET, our Web pages, our session state store, and some specialized back-end servers. The software and architecture are scalable via just simple sharding. We have little or no intention of using the cloud soon or ever. As we go live and grow, after the issue of the MSDN documentation, no doubt, and closely related to the documentation issue, our biggest concern will be Windows Server, SQL Server, and IIS installation, configuration, updates, security, monitoring, management, performance, administration, reliability, backup, and recovery -- little things like those. But from some of the just astounding successes Microsoft has running server farms with their software, clearly terrific results are possible; maybe we will be calling for some high end technical support. That's what we are doing!

vyrotek 12y ago

http://iactionable.com http://iactionable.com is a .NET/C# start-up. We're completely hosted in Windows Azure as well. We also went through the Microsoft BizSpark program which is amazing and I highly recommend it.

michaelsbradley 12y ago

Any .NET folks making use of ClojureCLR? https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr

grayrest 12y ago
Survey says probably not: https://cognitect.wufoo.com/reports/state-of-clojure-2014-results/ https://cognitect.wufoo.com/reports/state-of-clojure-2014-re... There was an announcement of Clojure in Unity3d [1] a couple weeks ago which is ClojureCLR. https://github.com/arcadia-unity/Arcadia https://github.com/arcadia-unity/Arcadia

orlandpm 12y ago

At Tachyus (http://tachyus.com http://tachyus.com) we have made a huge bet on F#, and it has paid off in spades. The back end of our SaaS product is 99%+ F#, and so far we have had a great experience using Azure for hosting. Our iOS apps are also built using 99%+ F# (using Xamarin, on Mono rather than .Net). The language allows us to write highly expressive code, and fewer lines of code overall. Using a Microsoft language has given us huge productivity benefits (most notably Visual Studio and Azure support). There is a fantastic F# community (http://fsharp.org http://fsharp.org) which is untethered to Microsoft, and it's exciting to see the language grow as an open-source and cross-platform tool.

jchonphoenix 12y ago
How does this compare to OCaml or Haskell? Most of the "benefits" you've mentioned here aren't actually benefits, but par the course for a programming language no matter what stack you choose. Visual Studio seems to be the only real benefit I'm seeing (and I agree, it's a very major benefit).
- logicchains 12y ago
  Compared to OCaml, F# has slightly nicer syntax, real multi-threading, and type providers (can e.g. automatically generate a type from a database schema). It lacks OCaml's awesome module system, higher-kinded polymorphism, OCaml's neat but rarely-used object system (it has C#'s object system hacked on instead), and on Mono at least it is generally slightly slower than OCaml. In my view the .net libaries are probably the biggest advantage over OCaml and Haskell. Similar to how access to Java libraries gives Clojure an advantage over lisps like Common Lisp and Racket. Oh, and if you want to use Windows without mingw then F# is a far better choice than OCaml or Haskell. The OCaml packaged manager doesn't even work properly on Windows, as far as I'm aware.
  - _random_ 12y ago
    Also it seems new versions of F# are released much more often than those of OCAML. Corporate backing is important.

cpayne 12y ago

https://www.moneysoft.com.au https://www.moneysoft.com.au - is a running on C# & SQL Server , hosted on our own servers. And https://www.calendartree.com/ https://www.calendartree.com/ (startup by Dilbert's Scott Adams + others) are C# / SQL site, on their own servers.

quink 12y ago
Anyone else getting ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID?
- pope13 12y ago
  Not getting the exact error, but the cert that https://www.moneysoft.com.au https://www.moneysoft.com.au is using is not actually for https://www.moneysoft.com.au https://www.moneysoft.com.au.
  - cpayne 12y ago
    Sorry, getting our app and website mixed up. Website: http://www.moneysoft.com.au/ http://www.moneysoft.com.au/ App: https://secure.moneysoft.com.au/ https://secure.moneysoft.com.au/

architgupta 12y ago

ClearTax -- cleartax.in uses the .net stack. We use F# and C#.

RobotCaleb 12y ago

What are you doing with this list?

nirajs 12y ago
Thanks. Basically, creating a network of startup folks to help each other with tools and ideas. Job board to find talents. We also make https://dotnetfiddle.net/ https://dotnetfiddle.net/ to collaborate, help educate all things .net

frugalmail 12y ago

Would love to see responses from the same users when the bizspark period is over. Seems like an idiotic choice to go vendor lock-in, small community, IMO sheltered mentality, high license fees (after bizspark), and difficult to automate operating systems. I suppose if you don't need a lot of machines it's not a problem yet, but seems like a lot of short sighted decisions.

jasonkester 12y ago
I run S3stat and Twiddla on the .net stack and my BizSpark term has passed. It was in no way a big deal. Yeah, servers cost money to provision. But then servers always cost money to provision regardless of your stack. Even with license fees, the MS stack wins for me because my entire server farm fits on three boxes instead of the twelve I'd need to get the same firepower on a typical rails stack. The extra few thousand in full price server licenses is just noise because really, we're talking about a business here, not a hobby. The bottom line is that if your business is going to fail because of a single $5,000 invoice, it's debatable whether it was ever a business to start with. The whole reason we all build SaaS businesses in the first place is the 95%+ profit margins. Fretting about what happens within that 5% that makes up the expense column seems a bit silly. Even without BizSpark, I bet I'll build the next product on the same stack. The math just plain works out.

taspeotis 12y ago

The project I work on isn't a startup per se but it's not completely dissimilar. We use: * ASP.NET for web with SQL Server + EF for the database and data access * Xamarin for mobile and OData for data access (back to our ASP.NET sites) The CLR is great because it's always been fast enough for our applications and every so often you get something for nothing. For example, CLR 4.5 brought better GC and RyuJIT is bringing better code generation. NET Native might give us even better performance. LINQ is amazing if you know your IQueryables from your IEnumerables and the difference between an Expression<Func<T, bool>> and a Func<T, bool>. Hosted in a private datacentre, not using Azure but we've got our eye on it (provisioning resources in the Azure Portal seems to get easier and easier than doing it ourselves). New Relic for monitoring the web sites. My biggest gripe (and it's not that big) is that within the Microsoft ecosystem/community everything works great but once you go outside it things are less well supported. Some less-popular-but-wow-that's-useful Javascript libraries don't come as NuGet packages. New Relic's .NET monitoring seems good but second fiddle to their other stuff. After that I'd say Xamarin is letting the team down. Every second or so release of theirs fixes two bugs but adds another one. Keeping an eye on Application Insights. It looks like it integrates nicely with Visual Studio Online, and VSO/TFS actually looks quite nice in parts (e.g. Bamboo for CI is largely geared towards Java apps not .NET but TFS' Release Management looks promising). I have my eye on VSO/TFS too but right now it looks like pros do not outweight the cons vs. our Atlassian applications. If you've got enough processing power and memory and a fast SSD to run Visual Studio + ReSharper it's coding heaven.

us0r 12y ago
"Keeping an eye on Application Insights." I love AI. I hate that they don't even provide a clue to what the pricing model for this will be though.
_random_ 12y ago
> "Some less-popular-but-wow-that's-useful Javascript libraries don't come as NuGet packages" The good will become perfect soon enough: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingGulpGruntBowerAndNpmSupportForVisualStudio.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingGulpGruntBowerAndNp...

benhamner 12y ago

We use C# and F# extensively at Kaggle: kaggle.com is an ASP.NET MVC app on Azure, and a good portion of our data processing is in C# or F#.

skrebbel 12y ago

At Izooble (http://www.izooble.com http://www.izooble.com - social product recommendation site), our entire backend is written in C#. We use ServiceStack (v3, which is still free) for our API, PostgreSQL for data. We host it all on Mono and Docker on Linux VPSs. We wanted Docker because we wanted PaaS-like deployment but not vendor lock in. Our team uses Linux, Windows and OSX to work on it. MonoDevelop is a pretty decent tool, on some areas actually better than VS. We're really happy about the choice. C# is a great language, NuGet beats pip and gem by miles (none of that virtualenv bull). If Mono support is a requirement from the set-out, you don't run into many compat problems.

aleem 12y ago
I really like that stack primarily because it couples c# with an open stack. Could you share a bit more about the web server setup and how you came to choose this stack?
- skrebbel 12y ago
  Came to choose: It was the only language that doesn't suck that the entire initial team had some to much experience with. About the open stack, seemed obvious to me - why knowingly lock yourself in? BizSpark is nice, and we're members, but not every startup takes off as fast as Slack and for a struggling company, licenses might be prohibitive. Server setup: We have 6 docker containers: Postgres, backend, nginx, assets, data and ssh. Backend is a ubuntu+mono+backend_code. Data is the docker data container pattern. Assets is the frontend code (we're an SLA). Ssh is an sshd for looking at the data and logs in the data container. Nginx and backend talk via fastcgi, one of ServiceStack's apphosts. Currently it's all on one server, but the code is prepared for scaling and load balancing.
xtrumanx 12y ago
Like aleem, I'd also love to hear more. Perhaps a post on the company blog. It would make great reading here on HN. The community gets to hear about a C#+Postgres+Mono+Docker stack and maybe you'll get some new users for your app or bright people making job inquiries. At the very least, increase brand awareness. Just don't forget; the company logo on the blog page should link to the app, not the blog.

redact207 12y ago

Our tech stack at Entomic (www.entomic.com) is all done in .NET. We've got a pretty common stack (at least we think so) - MVC5, WebAPI, SignalR running on Azure web and storage. Like others here who get set up on a MS stack, everything integrates very easily. Visual Studio IMO is still one of the best IDEs out there for what it does, and having that supported by a good CI system means very little is left to do except code.

Lelala 12y ago

At Lelala (https://www.lelala.de https://www.lelala.de), the MS stack with the typical layers is used: - IIS + ASP MVC - MSSQL (via ORM layer) - bunch of .NET/C# tools & stuff to support the main system Since it was asked what happens if the BizSpark period is over, let me state on detail about the model: In BizSpark, its true that you go vendor lock in as long as you are building strict dependency on their platform, lets say if you use EF for accessing SQL, you may have a problem in the long run. But: Even if you've left BizSpark, a MS Server License is to be paid once? (not per year, not every two years etc.) I do not understand where the myth comes from that one has to pay every year or continuously to use MS licenses? The math is simple: A W2K12 Standard server license costs around 850 USD (~ 700 EUR) - once - even if Opensource would is cheaper in term of license costs, a software running 24/7 for a one-time payment of 700 EUR isn't that expensive. Now, it comes down to scale up or scale out: - in the one scenario, because of no costs you can scale massivley out, going from one machine to n machines - but if you ever tried to administrate your machine park lonely(!!) if it counts 5+ machines (while you have to develop/maintain & run the app itself, too!), some may consider to hire a network admin (which is a fixed salary per year which usually outweighs the costs of your MS Server license) The reason why C# is used, is simple (and was stated above): - C# and .NET are very convenient and mature environments to write apps in - C# is considered by me as a beautiful language, i really like it (coming from x years of "C-styled-syntax-languages" could make me somehwat biased ;-) Instead of the licensing costs of MS products, i see much more important difficulties in the mid- to long-run future if someone built on it: MS maybe not survive the upcoming decade because of huge market shifts; then, in 10 years, it may be a problem if you will not get any support because the company maybe no more existing. God thanks, the next version of ASP MVC has a VM for *nix-derivatives, so you could solve this issue by running your app on a Linux-box. (And if you then have built your app additionally on a top of an ORM, you won't have any issues)

Lelala 12y ago
P.S.: i forgot: Jeff Atwood made a GREAT comparison on up-vs-out-scaling some years ago: http://blog.codinghorror.com/scaling-up-vs-scaling-out-hidden-costs/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/scaling-up-vs-scaling-out-hidde...
andrea_s 12y ago

everettForth 12y ago

The question reminded me of this classic: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-and-the-importance-of-being-stupid/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-...

Permit 12y ago

We're using it at Code Connect (http://codeconnect.io http://codeconnect.io). We build a plugin for Visual Studio, so there's not exactly a lot of choice. :) Personally, I've always enjoyed C#, so it's been a pretty positive experience on the whole.

doobiaus 12y ago

We're a start up using using .NET/C# MVC4 SQL Server etc etc. (Sorry can't give names Just call us "Medical Software"). There are a lot more .NET start-ups than one is lead to believe, but you don't hear so much about them because they're too busy making money to give interviews to TechCrunch ;) Seriously though, they tend to be from developers branching out of existing enterprises & "non-cool" fields and have existing customers or bootstrap funding. With Azure, AWS, Bizspark & MAPSDD cost implications of being on the .NET stack are negligible comparing to the long term savings in maintainability.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

raphinou 12y ago

Honest question: what are the advantages of this choice? I have horrible memories from the time i used microsoft software. Iirc iis had horrible logging, windows administration is not easy to be scripted (is there an ssh server/client by default?), you can be left alone if ms changes course (as has happened in the past), etc I personally feel much safer and efficient by avoiding ms, but curious to learn and hear counter arguments.

_random_ 12y ago
You seem to be coming from an admin/ops perspective. From developer's perspective it's two modern mainstream languages - F#, C# - that can be used on Windows, Azure, Mac, iOS, Android, WP as a well-defined workflow. The best IDE - Visual Studio + ReSharper + soon Roslyn. Second best ecosystem of libraries, that is picking up. There are some missing bits that are coming: docker and containers, dynamic compilation (of static typed code) when building web sites. It might not be the best choice in individual "disciplines", but it's the best overall.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
The question was a little ambiguous. "Microsoft Stack" could mean everything from MS, but it could also mean you just pick and choose. I've found the best value/growth combination to be Linux, Mono, and F#. If I need a database I'll use something free or open source. Right now I think folks are making a mistake if they decide to go "all Microsoft" or "no Microsoft". It's much more nuanced than that.

atko 12y ago

We're a startup (https://whoaverse.com https://whoaverse.com) using .NET4.5/C# MVC5 and SQL, currently working on getting set up in Switzerland. C# beauty, Visual Studio and Azure were the key factors why we decided to go with .NET.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

I've been using F# on Mono for all of my startup back-end work over several startup attempts.

WorldWideWayne 12y ago

I'm using Node.js + .NET for my part-time, single founder startup.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

This will be a little off topic since the last time I tried C# and .Net was many years ago (I was getting prepped to write a book on J2EE, and I wanted to spend a week using the competition first, to get a more balanced point of view): I want to praise Microsoft's BizSpark program. I was accepted a few months ago after I submitted my plan for a SaaS product. I am using Ubuntu servers on Azure, and Azure works well - fewer services than AWS, but a comparable developer's experience to AWS and Google's offerings. I definitely recommend looking into BizSpark if you are interesting in developing an SaaS business. Since I am using Linux, Haskell, and Ruby I am not really locked into using Azure, but if my SaaS product is successful, I will probably keep using Azure in gratitude for $150/month of free Azure use for up to 3 years. In general my attitude about Microsoft improved a lot earlier this year after trying their Office 360 product that works on all of my devices (MacBook, iPad, and Android phone). I like the direction the new CEO is taking the company.

fmavituna 12y ago

We are using .NET Stack for our web app scanner. Both for desktop and (https://www.netsparker.com/web-vulnerability-scanner/ https://www.netsparker.com/web-vulnerability-scanner/) and SaaS versions use .NET (https://www.netsparker.com/online-web-application-security-scanner/ https://www.netsparker.com/online-web-application-security-s...) We started with Bizspark as well, now we graduated and license cost is not much really. We also rely on MS stack for many things other than source code repository / CI etc.

dgudkov 12y ago

We use C#/F# for enterprise data processing app. C# for WPF front-end and F# for data processing back-end. F# was a total revelation for me and it has become my favorite programming language.

dmarlow 12y ago

We, at Degreed (https://degreed.com https://degreed.com), are using .NET, MVC 5, EF 6 on Azure. Front-end is Angular. We are part of BizSpark Plus which ends next month. Currently looking into whether or not VS 2013 Express for Web is sufficient. Reason for using it was tooling, hosting and familiarity. I enjoy being able to being able to fully debug the code and step through things. Makes things enjoyable, to say the least. I love C# and use it for everything I do. Only concern is the steep SQL pricing for the new tiers and the occasional blips as mentioned by siganakis. However, support is fast and helpful. Shameless plug: we're hiring. We're distributed/remote between SF, SLC and LA. Ping me for futher details. Disclaimer: former MS dev.

Aaronontheweb 12y ago

We (https://markedup.com/ https://markedup.com/) use C# heavily and do about 20-30k requests per minute on fairly small Elastic Beanstalk / EC2 instances. Mostly ASP.NET MVC, but we also use Akka.NET for a lot of our internal services.

Immortalin 12y ago

Contemplating on whether should I use ASP.Net webforms for my ecommerce site or stick with a no/minimum-coding required solution such as wordpress/drupal