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Comment by Yuioup | Hacker News Reader

It's sounds cool and all but would you run this in a production environment? I am a ASP.NET developer by day and Linux fan at night, but there is no way I can convince anyone run ASP.NET applications on Linux.

I don't think you can reliably run ASP.NET applications on Linux. Or am I mistaken?

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ServiceStack demos had been running on top of a Linux box for nearly one and a half year without a single reboot[1]. Much of the ASP.net stack had been opensourced by MS recently and the goodness had no doubt trickled down to mono. Of late, the mono framework has been concentrating more on mobile platforms than traditional desktop/server space.

[1] http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=838

I would say this is entirely dependent on your use case. If you are running some simple web services in a cloud environment, it is generally cheaper to run them on a Linux system. Granted, if you are developing in .NET, you have probably already forked over some heavy cash for the development tools (Visual Studio, the OS, ReSharper, etc...)

The key trade off is deciding if it is worth it to sacrifice compatibility with certain libraries for the development speed and costs of not having to learn an entirely new tech stack for yourself or your team.

As for running ASP.NET on Mono, I believe that both are mature and capable enough of running in a production environment. The mono website has a page listing various companies using Mono (some with ASP.NET): http://www.mono-project.com/Companies_Using_Mono

If you are running some simple web services in a cloud environment, it is generally cheaper to run them on a Linux system

afaik there's not so much difference between a vps/virtual machine running Windows Server or Linux. I.e. for a cloud provider I'm using there's a difference of 5euro on a low level machine (30 euro) and same price for a more powerful machine (110euro for a 4 vcpu 8gb ram 50gb disk)

Mind telling us what provider are you using? It's hard to find a Windows VPS provider at decent prices.

I recommend taking a look at Microsoft's own hosting services (Azure). You can get either shared website hosting or VPSs running Windows or Linux.

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenar...

You will be, but not quite the way the author details. The OWIN [0] specification (which was solidified back in October 2012) was designed to completely separate .net web applications from their host (i.e. ASP.NET dependency on IIS). Similar to Ruby's Rack[1], it allows you to compose applications using one or more frameworks and/or middleware[2].

The KatanaProject [3], by MS, is a suite of projects for creating and hosting owin compatible web applications and is expected to see a v1 in the coming months. The ASP.NET (System.Web) host is already at v1[4](yes, asp.net can _host_ owin apps) and is used by SignalR [5,6] which is entirely OWIN based. Mono builds of KatanaProject are being worked on [7] (log on as guest). There are alternative non-MS hosts being developed, though not sure if any are serious projects yet.

A future version of ASP.NET MVC will support OWIN[8].

You can of course use .net alternate frameworks instead of ASP.NET, such as FubuMVC[9], Oak[10], NancyFX[11], ServiceStack[12]. I know that NancyFX and ServiceStack support mono (linux) as a first-class OT, concern.

OT, but you can even run node.js in-proc with OWIN based host.[13].

There is a lot going on in the .NET web app area!

[0] http://owin.org/

[1] http://rack.github.com/

[2] http://dhickey.ie/post/2012/12/16/How-I-am-using-OWIN.aspx

[3] http://katanaproject.codeplex.com/

[4] http://nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.SystemWeb...

[5] http://nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNet.Signalr

[6] http://signalr.net/

[7] http://teamcity.codebetter.com/project.html?projectId=projec...

[8] http://aspnet.uservoice.com/forums/41199-general-asp-net/sug...

[9] http://mvc.fubu-project.org/