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Comment by jgg | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone give me a technical reason to deploy on a IIS and ASP platform instead of Apache/Nginx and one of the dozens of open source solutions for deploying a web application? From where I'm sitting, it seems to me the reasoning is "I drank the Microsoft Kool-Aid". Surely there's a better reason than that.

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ASP.NET is an extremely full-featured, well-tested, and carefully designed enterprise web stack.

What you're really asking is, why would you deploy on an enterprise stack as opposed to a modern app framework. There's lots of reasons, none of which will be congenial to you:

* A much larger pool of available developers

* Better enterprise integration features (depending on your platform, J2EE or ASP.NET may be predetermined for you)

* Better security controls (single signon, LDAP integration, permissioning, etc)

* A preexisting deployment platform that new ASP or J2EE apps can be rolled out onto.

There is really no good reason to do a web startup on ASP.NET or J2EE. So the short answer to your question is, "no, none of us should be using it." But there are lots of valid reasons for businesses to use it.

>* A much larger pool of available developers

I've never hired anyone, so I wouldn't know. Is the pool of MS devs really that much bigger than, say, your PHP users?

Is this a real question or a silly jab at Microsoft? I think you're underestimating the number of existing businesses who have .NET at their core, in which case the question is what justifies moving off of .NET? In my experience .NET can be - while not as hip - a very solid framework.

> you're underestimating the number of existing businesses who have .NET at their core

So, in essence, they are compounding one silly mistake (having .NET at their core) with a second one (using IIS)

Yes. This was a somewhat silly jab, but I couldn't resist.

Yes it was a real question, and I note that you've failed to answer it.

>I think you're underestimating the number of existing businesses who have .NET at their core, in which case the question is what justifies moving off of .NET? In my experience .NET can be - while not as hip - a very solid framework.

I wanted to know why you'd deploy on that platform initially. Of course if you're already fucking using it, you're probably not going to switch.

Sorry, I thought you were being intentionally daft by stating the only reason to deploy on IIS would be "Kool-Aid" etc. In any case, you quoted my short answer to what I thought was not really a question to begin with ("a very solid framework").

More like: "Management Drank the MS Kool-Aid"

If your boss says you must use IIS then not much you can do.

If management drinks the MS Kool-Aid, they're probably hiring people who drink the MS Kool-Aid.

That's not necessarily true. Microsoft lobbyists specifically target middle and upper management, and using arguments from authority, convince them that they must stay on Windows/IIS because it has better ROI.

For most companies, IIS does have a better ROI than, say, Rails.

Rails running on...?

If you pick and choose the other side of the comparison, you can may anything have a better ROI than anything else.

A better comparison would be Windows/IIS/.NET vs. Linux/Apache/<Insert Java Framework Here>

Substitute whatever you want for Rails, and ASP.NET will still have a better ROI for any given single application, and potentially (probably, in fact) for all their apps even if you artificially ignore switching costs.

We don't build apps in ASP.NET. We use Ruby. But we do a lot of security work for people with ASP.NET, are knee-deep in a lot of ASP.NET dev teams, and the things ASP.NET does for enterprise apps are not "kool-aid".

It's probably more accurate to say that they're hiring people who are willing to use MS tech to pull a salary, regardless of their personal preferences.

You use IIS because you want to use ASP. You can't replace ASP with Nginx, it's an entire development stack, not just a webserver. And I actually like ASP. It's fast, easy to develop with, easy to deploy and there's great library support.

Right, hence why I referred to them as a pair.

Good ms office integration. Thats interesting for many customers. Many customers also have IIS-Servers because office integrates good into these.

Good ms product integration in gereral should also be a valid point.

Also if a company has gotten into the above some time back, when asp on iis servers was the only way(?) for enterprise office integration for large reporting systems, it's easier to let the asp developers learn asp.net and integrate the old enterpise systems with the new. When the old systems are rewritten, asp.net is the way to go, because the customer already has large parts of the infrastructure.

If you're deploying an app in to an enterprise that is already running an AD environment with other Microsoft products like SharePoint, Exchange, Office, and Microsoft Dynamics, it makes a lot of sense. I'm a Mac user and our startup is a kool-aid drinkin' Ruby on Rails shop, but I have administered enough large networks to see the power and value of Microsoft in the enterprise. Like it or not, the integration between Windows clients, Windows servers, and Microsoft applications is pretty incredible.

Hmm, I hadn't thought about that. I didn't realize most of Microsoft's tools integrated so well.

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