7 ms·

I for one am extremely excited about having MS supported ASP.Net on Linux. Mono is a great community effort, but the server side has always lagged Windows pret

I for one am extremely excited about having MS supported ASP.Net on Linux. Mono is a great community effort, but the server side has always lagged Windows pretty heavily. Having the same level of API and implementation support at a core level on Linux will be awesome. Shall be interesting to see how this affects IIS market share in 5-10 years time.

taspeotis 12y ago
> Shall be interesting to see how this affects IIS market share in 5-10 years time. Well OWIN supports self-hosting so perhaps this will not bode well for IIS outside of enterprise environments.
- danabramov 12y ago
  I wonder whether or not this was difficult due to internal politics. I doubt IIS team is too happy about this.
  - jameshart 12y ago
    I guess IIS and Windows Server have an important role providing high performance HTTP service hosting nodes in Azure. If this effort from the .NET team can revive the future of .NET server-side development, the server team can capitalize on the integration of the managed stack on top of the kernel-mode http.sys web tier, to provide a first class hosting environment for ASP.NET applications on the Azure cloud. Microsoft is the one hosting provider in the world who can scale out Windows servers without having to worry about license costs.
    - Mandatum 12y ago
      Is there any anti-competitive laws they'd have to adhere to to take away that "advantage"?
      - ensignavenger 12y ago
        Amazon and Google don't have to license their cloud technology, so why would Microsoft (be forced to adjust license costs. or to license it at all)? (Unless MS were to become the dominant hosting provider and some anti-monopoly law or regulation were to come into play, but right now they are far from there.) Licensing IIS is a side business to the cloud hosting business.
- kellros 12y ago
  From what I can tell, the IIS team is embracing OWIN. Be sure to check out Project Helios (http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/02/helios http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/02/helios). *Helios can be compared to OpenResty in the sense that the application runs directly on-top of the (core) web server, instead of a plugin/pipeline. In my humble opinion, self-hosting is useful as long as it's feasible to reinvent the web server wheel. In terms of IIS that can include url rewriting, caching, compression, performance tracing, critical error logging, request logging, endpoint configuration including SSL (and SNI), zero downtime deployments, graceful shutdowns and much more. The programming tendencies nowadays is to build highly specialized software (high cohesion), with only the needed dependencies (low coupling) and a small surface area to promote faster iterations (micro services). Based on the above observation, the approach of Microsoft to release and endorse a cross-platform <core> .NET is commendable and is exactly what we need right now. There's much to say about the downsides of the bring-your-own-x composition approach, but I truly believe the issues we face today will be addressed over time as the discipline and dedication of the programming community as a whole increase due to the increase in responsibility.
- NicoJuicy 12y ago
  Asp.Net vNext can be run from Nginx or Apache, i think that will have a bigger influence then selfhosting.
ghuntley 12y ago
Massive shoutout to David Kean (MSFT:AU) and his team who managed to pull this off. https://www.mail-archive.com/ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com/msg11187.html https://www.mail-archive.com/ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com/msg11187....
robert_tweed 12y ago
TBH, this could help IIS in the long run, since it should improve adoption of .Net. This could also be the sort of kick in the pants that's needed to make IIS evolve into something people would choose on merit. The difference between IIS of today and IIS of 2020 could be very much like the difference between IE 6 and IE 11.
- 300bps 12y ago
  The difference between IIS of today and IIS of 2020 could be very much like the difference between IE 6 and IE 11 As a Microsoft developer with two MCSD certifications and an MCDBA certification, I actually laughed at this. IE11 is certainly better than IE6, but I find it unusable comparable to its modern day competition. Abysmal plugin support, none of the nice usability features of Chrome (ex: Paste and Go on address bar, right-click Search Google for highlighted text, etc) and more leads me to believe Microsoft should give up with IE and start over with an IE branded version of Webkit or heck even Chromium. They could continue their Xbox marketing and call it Internet Explorer One and actually dominate the browser wars again. Leave the old IE classic on there for the small percentage of people that need ActiveX support (blech).
  - gregd 12y ago
    As someone who has to use IE11 on a daily basis, I would have to concur. I absolutely LOATHE using it and I'm most certainly NOT a Microsoft basher. About the only plugins that I can find that are worth anything (read as: works) on IE11 are Lastpass and Fiddler. So the OPs comparison is not a very good one.
  - gtk40 12y ago
    Does IE11 even support ActiveX? I didn't think that it did. I tend to use IE11 because it is lighter on memory usage than Firefox or IE and my machine has only 4GB of RAM. Also, it has a lot of those features. By default, I have right click and search with Bing and there are many accelerators that do the same thing. Plus, I don't see how so-called limitations in the shell should lead to an underlying engine change. I think Trident works well, although the main frustrating thing is that it doesn't work with a lot of IE only sites ironically (my company's old version of Outlook webmail, my credit union, etc.).
yc1010 12y ago
I wonder how it would compare in performance to latest PHP/Nginx stack which is rather very fast with good code. And then there is major improvements in PHP on horizon and already alternatives like Facebooks PHP implementation
- frowaway001 12y ago
  Why the hell would anyone ever use PHP for anything?
  - RyanMcGreal 12y ago
    I personally despise coding in PHP as much as anyone, but it has been used for a number of hugely successful projects, including Wikipedia and Facebook (that latter has even written a transpiler that converts PHP into C++). PHP is the bog standard on a LAMP stack so you know it will run on any environment, and there is a huge pool of programmers who know how to code it. Those are nontrivial reasons.
    - frowaway001 12y ago
      If you consider Wikipedia a good example of what PHP can do, we have irreconcilably different quality standards. I think the technical debt of PHP is a huge reason why development of the software behind Wikipedia hasn't fixed any of the huge issues in the last 5 years.
      - RyanMcGreal 12y ago
        I cite Wikipedia as an example of a successful website built with PHP, not necessarily as an example of a well-designed site. You don't need to convince me that PHP is a clunky, unpleasant language. My point is that there are still legitimate reasons to choose it.
        hobarrera 12y ago
        The fact that there are successful website implemente in PHP is not a legitimate reason to choose it.

taspeotis 12y ago

> Shall be interesting to see how this affects IIS market share in 5-10 years time. Well OWIN supports self-hosting so perhaps this will not bode well for IIS outside of enterprise environments.

danabramov 12y ago
I wonder whether or not this was difficult due to internal politics. I doubt IIS team is too happy about this.
- jameshart 12y ago
  I guess IIS and Windows Server have an important role providing high performance HTTP service hosting nodes in Azure. If this effort from the .NET team can revive the future of .NET server-side development, the server team can capitalize on the integration of the managed stack on top of the kernel-mode http.sys web tier, to provide a first class hosting environment for ASP.NET applications on the Azure cloud. Microsoft is the one hosting provider in the world who can scale out Windows servers without having to worry about license costs.
  - Mandatum 12y ago
    Is there any anti-competitive laws they'd have to adhere to to take away that "advantage"?
    - ensignavenger 12y ago
      Amazon and Google don't have to license their cloud technology, so why would Microsoft (be forced to adjust license costs. or to license it at all)? (Unless MS were to become the dominant hosting provider and some anti-monopoly law or regulation were to come into play, but right now they are far from there.) Licensing IIS is a side business to the cloud hosting business.
kellros 12y ago
From what I can tell, the IIS team is embracing OWIN. Be sure to check out Project Helios (http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/02/helios http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/02/helios). *Helios can be compared to OpenResty in the sense that the application runs directly on-top of the (core) web server, instead of a plugin/pipeline. In my humble opinion, self-hosting is useful as long as it's feasible to reinvent the web server wheel. In terms of IIS that can include url rewriting, caching, compression, performance tracing, critical error logging, request logging, endpoint configuration including SSL (and SNI), zero downtime deployments, graceful shutdowns and much more. The programming tendencies nowadays is to build highly specialized software (high cohesion), with only the needed dependencies (low coupling) and a small surface area to promote faster iterations (micro services). Based on the above observation, the approach of Microsoft to release and endorse a cross-platform <core> .NET is commendable and is exactly what we need right now. There's much to say about the downsides of the bring-your-own-x composition approach, but I truly believe the issues we face today will be addressed over time as the discipline and dedication of the programming community as a whole increase due to the increase in responsibility.
NicoJuicy 12y ago
Asp.Net vNext can be run from Nginx or Apache, i think that will have a bigger influence then selfhosting.

ghuntley 12y ago

Massive shoutout to David Kean (MSFT:AU) and his team who managed to pull this off. https://www.mail-archive.com/ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com/msg11187.html https://www.mail-archive.com/ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com/msg11187....

robert_tweed 12y ago

TBH, this could help IIS in the long run, since it should improve adoption of .Net. This could also be the sort of kick in the pants that's needed to make IIS evolve into something people would choose on merit. The difference between IIS of today and IIS of 2020 could be very much like the difference between IE 6 and IE 11.

300bps 12y ago
The difference between IIS of today and IIS of 2020 could be very much like the difference between IE 6 and IE 11 As a Microsoft developer with two MCSD certifications and an MCDBA certification, I actually laughed at this. IE11 is certainly better than IE6, but I find it unusable comparable to its modern day competition. Abysmal plugin support, none of the nice usability features of Chrome (ex: Paste and Go on address bar, right-click Search Google for highlighted text, etc) and more leads me to believe Microsoft should give up with IE and start over with an IE branded version of Webkit or heck even Chromium. They could continue their Xbox marketing and call it Internet Explorer One and actually dominate the browser wars again. Leave the old IE classic on there for the small percentage of people that need ActiveX support (blech).
- gregd 12y ago
  As someone who has to use IE11 on a daily basis, I would have to concur. I absolutely LOATHE using it and I'm most certainly NOT a Microsoft basher. About the only plugins that I can find that are worth anything (read as: works) on IE11 are Lastpass and Fiddler. So the OPs comparison is not a very good one.
- gtk40 12y ago
  Does IE11 even support ActiveX? I didn't think that it did. I tend to use IE11 because it is lighter on memory usage than Firefox or IE and my machine has only 4GB of RAM. Also, it has a lot of those features. By default, I have right click and search with Bing and there are many accelerators that do the same thing. Plus, I don't see how so-called limitations in the shell should lead to an underlying engine change. I think Trident works well, although the main frustrating thing is that it doesn't work with a lot of IE only sites ironically (my company's old version of Outlook webmail, my credit union, etc.).

yc1010 12y ago

I wonder how it would compare in performance to latest PHP/Nginx stack which is rather very fast with good code. And then there is major improvements in PHP on horizon and already alternatives like Facebooks PHP implementation

frowaway001 12y ago
Why the hell would anyone ever use PHP for anything?
- RyanMcGreal 12y ago
  I personally despise coding in PHP as much as anyone, but it has been used for a number of hugely successful projects, including Wikipedia and Facebook (that latter has even written a transpiler that converts PHP into C++). PHP is the bog standard on a LAMP stack so you know it will run on any environment, and there is a huge pool of programmers who know how to code it. Those are nontrivial reasons.
  - frowaway001 12y ago
    If you consider Wikipedia a good example of what PHP can do, we have irreconcilably different quality standards. I think the technical debt of PHP is a huge reason why development of the software behind Wikipedia hasn't fixed any of the huge issues in the last 5 years.
    - RyanMcGreal 12y ago
      I cite Wikipedia as an example of a successful website built with PHP, not necessarily as an example of a well-designed site. You don't need to convince me that PHP is a clunky, unpleasant language. My point is that there are still legitimate reasons to choose it.
      - hobarrera 12y ago
        The fact that there are successful website implemente in PHP is not a legitimate reason to choose it.