Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

It's just not trendy and the release cycle is very long compared to open source. The long release cycle contributes to the tech side being less newsworthy. Also, the stack is fairly standardized so if you are making a website your stack is going to be either ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC and it's going to run on the sanctioned VM, and you'll likely be running SQL Server.

Contrast this with the ruby stack you might be running MRI, YARV, Rubinius for your VM, and then for your web framework you might be running rack, sinatra, etc. Thus when someone makes their stack OpenBSD + YARV + Sinatra + Active Record it's newsworthy as the non-standardization likely created some kind of interesting issue they needed to solve. This stuff doesn't happen on the MSFT side of things. If someone says they are doing a MSFT start up the only real question about their stack is LINQ-to-SQL / ADO.NET entities / nhibernate. I already know that the rest of their stack is going to be Win2k(3|8)R2 + IIS + ASP.NET + SQL Server and it's going to be written in C#.

I was considering doing an Win2k8R2/F#/MVC/nhaml/LINQ-TO-SQL start up but my market isn't tech guys so any blogging I did about my unique stack would attract people who wouldn't be interested in the startup.

I must take this opportunity to note that the ASP.Net MVC release cycle is far more aggressive than Rails.

Secondly... SQL Server is by no means required in the stack. We are using MongoDB as our datasource in an ASP.Net MVC app. You can use ANY database.

Sweet, how is MongoDB working for you?

It's fantastic... Fast, reliable, and damn easy to work with.

Granted, we aren't in production yet... Will see how that goes :)

Yeah that's a good point that I think non-.Net dev's aren't aware of - you really aren't that locked into doing it the 'MS Way'. Like you mentioned you don't have to use SQL - it's up to you, really, on the DB.

Similarly, you don't have to use ASPX/WebForms either; a lot of people I know are switching to MVC and not using any of the .net ms usercontrols on the front-end, instead going with open standards and using something like jQuery to handle a lot of the UI and web-service interaction. This is the approach I've taken in recent years, and it makes it a ton easier to create clients for other platforms like iPhone, Droid, etc.

Yeah on that note you can use ANY view engine to run your ASP.Net MVC application - you are not locked in to the classic web forms system. We use jQuery and standards based html/css to do everything.

We're using ASP.Net MVC2 with Mongo DB as well. So far the experience has been fabulous. Even more so considering that the entire development process from coding to deployment has been done completely on Linux - giving us more flexibility with deployments like being able to use Varnish for caching, etc.

We spent three weeks evaluating Rails, Flask and Django for the app, and the team had experience with all three tools. The risky move to a statically typed, compiled environment paid off because of a solid IDE and good surrounding tools.

That's not entirely accurate. MVC releases major releases once per year - Rails releases quite often... just not full point releases. In fact they pushed 2.3.4 and within a week pushed 2.3.5 as there was a bug found :).

Yes, you can use any DB - good point.

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