Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Up until very recently it wasn't even possible to host a .NET backend without the rest of the MS stack (Windows Server, IIS), and that by itself made it a non-starter for most startups. It was also closed source and required very expensive licenses (Visual Studio cost thousands of dollars per developer per year).

Things have improved now with dotnet core and everything else, but it takes more than 2-3 years to gain acceptance and widespread use.

View on HN

One thing that really sucked about using the original .NET was that even using something like Elastic Beanstalk on AWS, your costs were basically 4 times what .NET Core is, with all the downsides of managing a Windows server (shudder).

Core is a complete contrast. For a fairly boring CRUD web service, entity framework is a genuinely good O-R mapper and deploying .net core web services in a container is so easy it's literally childs play with the AWS toolkit installed in visual studio.

I get it that a lot of developers just don't think it's cool enough and that it carries a lot of the same dependency hell as Node (well, it's better than Node for that) but for my use case it's trouble free and allows a single person shop to quickly update and deploy an entire backend system without having to manage servers or licenses or anything. Microsoft do get money out of me via the Visual Studio subscription, but I needed that for other reasons so I figure it's a sunk cost.

I recently cancelled my VS subscription, just couldn't see any reason not to just use the community edition.

Access to licences for things like windows server and sql server. I run an old hp ML350 as a dev workstation, has windows server and sql server on it for some side hustle consulting work.

You can't use the licenses for production systems but they sure are handy for spinning up replicas of on premises customer setups.

SQL server dev is free now and runs on linux.

Yes that's true but a few of the people I deal with are using SSIS or report server and those don't run on Linux. For those customers, being able to do some testing on a replica of their setup is very handy, so that's what I pay the visual studio license for.

Previously, it was also tightly integrated with MSSQL. I like MSSQL but it becomes prohibitively expensive once you reach a certain size.

On the side I've been building a job listing site for tech jobs in Australia with .NET core, currently it's on a $5/m Vultr instance with a postgres DB. This wouldn't have been possible to do a few years back: https://www.headhunted.com.au

Yeah, the perception of .NET-centered companies around my area has typically been that of a large, non-technology oriented enterprise which noticed they are behind around 10 years ago, and since they were using Microsoft for everything, they went for .NET (and Azure). This is to a degree also reflected in who you can hire with .NET experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com