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Comment by utsmokingaces | Hacker News Reader

Anyone tell me the advantages of using .NET for a scrappy web startup?

I learn to develope in ASP.NET in college and found that finding support online is quite difficult (damn gridview).

With the maturity of Django, RoR, and PhP frameworks is it worth it to find a bizspark partner and pay microsoft tax until the your business dies?

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Visual Studio cannot be beaten, especially when free. C# is evolving towards better support for concurrency and functional style programming. F# is getting much acclaim even from die hard critics of .NET. You can use one framework for your entire application--be it frontend (ASP.NET MVC), backend, enterprise, even distributed computing on Amazon (MPI.NET). An added bonus is that the majority of professional programmers out there are familiar with .NET in case you ever need to hire (this is slightly more true outside the realm of web development and silicon valley).

Regarding support online, I've never had a problem self learning .NET, especially with MSDN, the ASP.NET community at large, and now stackoverflow.com.

Visual Studio cannot be beaten.

Visual Studio is a provincial piece of work that can't even get its imitations right - viz. the need for plugins (Resharper) to bring it up to minimal acceptability. The only people I know who praise Visual Studio are the ones who believe that Microsoft is responsible for all computing innovation.

(Though I seem to recall that as a C++ environment 10 years ago it was pretty good.)

@gruseom, yeah you put that in right words, i agree!!!

I want to add to the chorus of "What experience are you comparing Visual Studio to?" You're sort of damning it with faint praise by touting things like "evolving towards concurrency" and Microsoft's alpha-quality OCaml clone, F#, as a selling point. Obviously .NET wouldn't have a future if it wasn't doing cloud, functional, concurrent, and support online, but it's sort of chasing the taillights of the open-source community there.

Scheme, Ruby and C mainly. Starting to explore Python and Objective C for various reasons. My comment wasn't intended to tout .NET as the best technology for every purpose as I realize the advantages of higher level languages for everyday development. He asked for a few advantages of .NET and I sincerely believe that with this new program, a lot of the barriers to using MSFT technologies have been removed. My current start up deals more with numerical problems that IMO are best tackled by C# and C++/CLI (or Python with C extensions). Similarly, if I was looking to write a simple web app, I'd go with ruby.

Maybe I read more into "cannot be beaten" than you intended. Thanks for sharing your experience!

What is your experience with tools and technologies besides .NET and Visual Studio? Can you compare fairly?

The best place for ASP.NET support right now is stackoverflow.com. Outside of that, you'll find ASP.NET to be much more valuable and productive once you get away from doing it the Microsoft way. Close the designer, learn the page lifecycle if you must use Webforms, try ASP.NET MVC, don't use ASP.NET AJAX, turn off ViewState and avoid any of the *View controls. The built-in controls were designed Winforms developers so they could easily get started developing with Webforms. Once you get over that (it took me a long time), the framework becomes really enjoyable and powerful to work with.

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