ILSpy is the open-source .NET assembly browser and decompiler.
wiki.sharpdevelop.net
wiki.sharpdevelop.net
"Our commitment is to maintain an amazing free tool ..."
http://www.red-gate.com/our-company/about/news/net-reflector
february 2011:
"Red Gate has announced that it will charge $35 for version 7 of .NET Reflector upon its release in early March"
http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-development/reflecto...
"As many of you know, our original intention was to maintain .NET Reflector as a free tool. But, after two-and-a-half years of providing it without charge, we realized that we could not make the free model work. We know that this will cause pain for some people in the .NET community, and we apologize for the change in policy.
As a commercial company, we need to charge at least a nominal amount to keep .NET Reflector up-to-date and relevant. Without revenue coming in, we cannot dedicate a team of developers to ensure that Reflector remains a valuable part of .NET developers’ toolboxes."
They gave it a shot, for 2.5 years, and it didn't work. It's hard to fault them. Consider how ridiculously low $35 is for any tool of this sort, I don't think this is some money grubbing effort on Red-Gate's part.
RedGate makes some lovely tools but they fucked up royally with Reflector.
BTW, have you ever considered that if Red Gate didn't buy Reflector from Lutz, he might've stopped maintaining it for free on into perpetuity? That at some point, he might've realized that he was giving away something that people found extraordinarily useful, and might have tried to monetize it himself? What if, 2-3 years ago, we were instead reading a blog post from Lutz saying that he was going to start charging $200/license for Reflector, effective immediately? Would you still be so morally outraged? If not, why?
Also, how the fuck they tried "really hard" to maintain freemium ? Since they brought Reflector they basically added the VS debugger integration FOR MONEY. How is that trying really hard for the free version ?!
Just to be understood correctly. I don't have anything against RedGate. In fact , as i said, they made some great tools. But grabbing one of the best FREE tools in the .net world and trying to monetize (after pledging for a free version) just makes them seem assholes.
Also, what stops people from saying "it's money grubbing to have a crippled freebie like this and demand $35 for full version".
$35 is nothing. I wrote decompilers and they're pretty damn hard and require constant upkeep and testing.
I'm curious, so:
AskHN: Are you using .NET on your startup and why did you chose it?
1. We already know it well and it's good enough.
2. Things just work. Somehow I'm expecting to face lots of strange problems in RoR with stuff like encoding, threads, networking.
The one thing about this change is that traditional licensing concerns go away. If you use Azure, you are paying by usage, so Windows licenses aren't in play. I guess my point is that the fear of launching a startup and having to face spirling license costs (for using MS products) is going to decline as more people adopt cloud platforms.
Besides that, Azure is NOT usage payed, Azure is an approximation to that I would call scalable server rental. You pay by time and size, not by use. Maybe that explains Azure's momentum, they're getting things right and discouraging people by having expensive/inadequate prices. I hope they get it right soon, and that they start billing by usage.
I do .Net at an agency and I like it but it's amazing how much noise there is in the Microsoft ecossystem.
As for usage costs, doesn't Azure use the same model as all the others, e.g. EC2, in that cost = compute hours (i.e. instance running) + data transfer + storage? So if by usage you mean ultra accurate per CPU millisecond billing, then I don't anyone does that? Would be great though. Happy to be proved wrong though, I'm no expert on this...
I also think that the problem of the production environment costs is a good one to have, nobody should fear to start a business because of them. If you can't solve that problem it means you have the wrong business model or really bad engineers.
Oops my bad, I tought others did the billing by CPU load instead of by hour.
(Macintosh : PC with MS Windows) in 1995 = (.NET+C# : Java) in 2010
The latter is cheaper and has more choice, but the former fits together so much better.
My background is Windows dev, that is why "we" choose it in he first place.
Although I have experimented with Ruby and Python both I never felt like the incurring the cost of learning curve while trying to complete a project. In my opinion my customers do not care about the language the application is written in as long as they are accessing it from a browser.
One thing I want to point out is that the monthly costs for VPS are much higher compared to linux nodes and it has a significant impact on hosting costs every month.
However, I've been looking at postgreSQL for a while and it looks ok. I am curious if anyone has tried this before.
Has anyone done this with MySql/PostgreSQL?
We use it because we know it and can launch something fast. It does everything we need it to do, maybe the backend is not very elegant, but functionality wise, it's all there. For us, getting a userbase and revenue going is far more desirable than learning the new 'ultimate platform that scales to the universe'.
And 99% of what I do is simple tools that can be done in .NET with a few libraries from Codeplex and a little UI work.
- I like C# as a language. It's easy to work with and the compiler catches a lot of things that would be runtime errors in php or python.
- I like Visual Studio a lot. I'm far more productive in that environment than anything else I've tried in other languages.
- For what I'm doing the cost of Windows is far less than the lost productivity working in another environment would give me.
- SQL Server 2008 is just awesome.
- Using LINQ to SQL has saved me a ton of time.
Either they work fast or were already working on this.