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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

What do people here think of .Net as a choice of platform for startups?

Well, mine is just one voice, but as someone who's worked for a startup running on the Microsoft stack (ASP.NET 3.5) I can tell you that there are a lot of "cool" libraries out there available for only $799! And there's a lot of cheap labor available overseas to knock out those little side features and tasks for you, all you have to do is drop their code in, then spend a bunch of time trying to make it actually work. And there's Microsoft BizSpark, so you don't have to pay for your software <whisper>until later</whisper>. Oh, and servers...err...yeah they're expensive, sorry, there's no way to spin that one.

Just from my experience, .NET as a platform for startsups can be made to sound really good by the people selling it, and there are some startups out there doing it and making it work for them, to which I say good on ya! But from my experience, it ends up being the boat anchor weighing you down. There are a TON of developers available, but finding good ones can be very difficult. Hosting is expensive (compared to linux-compatible solutions), and third party components are plentiful and expensive, and usually still require a fair amount of work to integrate.

My boss at my last job used to say "how can we make this faster? Why is everything so slow?" Well, because you started with a code base written by people who aren't really passionate about software development, they just took your specs and spit something out, so it gets the job done, but just barely. Then you bolted on a bunch of fancy UI components and ajaxified some stuff to give it the appearance of being less slow (oh, and look how pretty your GumDropGridView is!) Cram all of that into the cluster (f*ck) of servers in your server closet and you had a webapp you could start charging people to use. Now you've hired me and you want me to tell you how to make it faster? Well, it can be done, but we've got a lot of work to do. What's that? You've got 3 months worth of funding left? Dude, what do you want me to say?

I think it's great. Get BizSpark or WebsiteSpark to cover your licensing costs during development; start with el-cheapo $20/mo hosting which gives you reasonable bandwidth and MS SQL option - and you are all set. If three years down the road (that's how long *Spark lasts) you will find yourself thinking about licensing costs - you aren't doing it right: in three years of startup it's either you're getting enough profits to cover your licensing expenses, or you're in deep trouble no matter what license is.

I hear this often, but I don't buy it. The implications [seems] to be that most startups either succeed or fail within 3 years.

Does anyone have proof of this?

My personal observation is that most companies will still be around and they'll neither be millionaires nor broke. In such a situation, the bizspark bait-n-switch can be significant.

Picking technology today on the basis that you'll either crash and burn or be hugely successful in 3 years seems like the sales pitch of a man who lends you free software for 3 years.

My point is: if you're doing a startup, you want to have a business, not a hacking hobby. If three years down the road your business isn't generating enough profit one way or another, it's a "busyness" and you seriously should consider doing something else.

There's a lot of room in the gap between marginally profitable and exponential growth. Not every startup is necessarily going to end up making millions - not within 3 years, 10 years, maybe ever. That doesn't make it a "busyness," nor does it make it not worth doing.

> if you're doing a startup, you want to have a business, not a hacking hobby

That's funny, because I know at least 2 businesses that started out as hacking hobbies ... Apple and Google.

You also don't know when your business will reach the "tipping point", going from barely profitable to hugely profitable ... it could be 3 years from now, it could be 7.

... and until then spending thousands of dollars on software for a single server is just plain stupid from a business perspective, when you could be investing in something else or just give those money away as bonuses if you've got nothing else to do with it.

"Get BizSpark or WebsiteSpark to cover your licensing costs during development..."

Like offering free crack to drug addicts! No wonder .NET continues to exist.

More like pushers giving free dope out at grade schools. Get them while they're young and you'll have them till they die.

for a client application or for the backend?

SQL Server + Windows licensing can get crazy expensive. I know stackoverflow made it work via http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ but I believe even with that program you'll have to cough up the exorbitant licensing fees eventually.

more here: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/stack-overflow-and-biz...

Only exorbitant if your app isn't making any money but generating a lot of db time.

Nothing stopping you using another database - I've started using CouchDB with an ASP.Net MVC application and it all hangs together pretty well.

You could use MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite etc. just as easily.

The drivers for MySQL / PostgreSQL are very slow, not to mention stuff like LINQ / Visual Studio integration which are piss-poor, making you wish for SQL Server.

People are used to throw such examples in the air, like you forgot "hey, there's Mono if you want Linux" ... but how many real apps used by actual people diverge from the MS stack?

Hint: it's not ignorance.

Of course, not that many - but it is possible.

I've designed ASP.Net apps that have had back ends of various forms (everything from navigational databases to Oracle OLAP systems) and once you get over the need to have direct support in Visual Studio then it's not really that big a deal.

YMMV.

I switched to Mono & MySql & Linux a year ago for my startup and in my experience performance is the same or even faster than .Net & SQL Server & Windows.

A couple of complex queries not optimized at all where slow in MySql and very fast in SQL Server but I think that that is because of the database engine itself and not because of the driver.

The tools are great, and there are a variety of MS programs available to get you using them at low (and sometimes zero) cost - Websitespark and Dreamspark (for students) are both good. From my perspective, the major drawback is that hosting is more expensive.

Not merely playing the devils advocate here, but what exactly do you mean by "the tools are great"? I have heard that numerous times about MS stuff, but I don't really get it.

I find that the oss/linux/socialist camp has some excellent tools available. But maybe you mean something different by "tools" than I do.

Visual Studio is excellent. I have my doubts about MSBuild, but the actual code-wrangling side is very good.

Doubly so if you plump for ReSharper.

No hidden message - I just meant that from my perspective, the tools are really nice. I use Visual Studio 2010 with Resharper for .NET development. I use Red Gate's tools for database management.

There's plenty of great FOSS stuff. I didn't intend for my message to suggest otherwise.

I've always suspected that it would discourage some OSS-focused companies from acquiring you, but I don't have any proof. It would be interesting to hear if there are any startups that had difficulty finding an exit because their product was built in .net.

Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1259195

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