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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

I currently work at a fairly large MS client. No way we're going to abandon .Net right now or in the next few years.

We're currently in the process of getting ready for a migration to Sharepoint Server 2013 which will cement the company with .Net for at least the next two to three years. We still have several sites on the old 2007 platform with no hint of moving those over any time soon.

I'm wondering what you see as viable open source alternatives to the .Net platform.

Also, we have a handful of .Net developers and they've all said a majority of the work they've had in the last year did not involve MVC3 or MVC4 so I'm also wondering what the future of this platform will be.

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I think the future of the MVC framework is a better question. It's stuck in the middle of two worlds- huge corporate projects don't use it, and anyone that even thinks about MVC will be more likely to use something like Ruby.

> huge corporate projects don't use it

Incorrect assumption (source: developer at huge corporation on huge projects)

OK, most huge corporate projects don't use it.

Point is, there was no huge shift to MVC after it was released. A ton of web projects are still made using WebForms and will continue to be. MVC will continue to be a minority framework.

In my experience, MVC has already become extremely popular among medium-sized orgs with at least somewhat ambitious developers. Very large orgs with rosters of stuck-in-time developers who really love WebForms and custom control libraries, and fear or hate jQuery, well... they're not going to change until MSFT officially proclaims that WebForms are for chumps. Even though they are chumps, that will spur them to change.

I could be wrong, but I don't think that's true. I have come across a lot more ASP.NET MVC + JavaScript jobs than I have WebForms the past couple of years.

I think the shift has quietly occurred because everyone wants at least a little AJAX, and everyone wants jQuery, and once you've thrown those in the mix, who wants to do that using WebForms?

> Point is, there was no huge shift to MVC after it was released.

Why would you assume that if they can't move to a new architecture, they'll move to a new language and OS?

Just the number of unfilled requirements for ASP.NET MVC shows around 2000 openings.

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22asp.net+mvc%22&l=

I don't know if I agree with this. I've worked on large MVC applications for government, they definitely exist. MVC is IMO a simpler (and more consistent?) beast than aspnet, and in my experience doesn't have the same lazy legacy/dinosaur developers, so there's a smaller volume of questions for the number of lines of code written.

.NET vs Ruby is a whole holy war which I'm not going to get into, but there are a lot of people out there who like to get shit done, and find that .NET (and MVC) works just fine (great even) for that.

>I'm wondering what you see as viable open source alternatives to the .Net platform.

Mono? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)

Or going in a different direction with similar goals, Qt.

> Mono? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)

You are funny.

If you think Mono is a viable alternative to the .NET platform, you don't understand why people choose .NET.

Don't get me wrong, Mono is awesome. But it's not about to be adopted by Fortune 500 companies across the world.

To someone with very little understanding of these technologies, could you give a quick word on what the problem is with Mono? Are we talking about performance, completeness, support or something else?

There are a couple of technical issues with Mono, the biggest ones being completeness and tools integration.

But, above all, the biggest problem is not technical and not Mono itself: it is Xamarin. The money decisions on big companies are made by people that need to tell to non-technical bosses and shareholders why they did what they did. And it is much easier to talk to them about Microsoft than about Xamarin.

Remember the "no one ever lost their job for buying IBM"? It works for MS, now.

No Windows Presentation Foundation support is one thing some would miss. Seriously though, there's a lot of clients out there that would probably not miss the Microsoft branding if they got over the .net label missing. Perhaps not larger enterprise clients that rely on specific MS tools and support, but a lot of smaller businesses could leave it just fine that use it for things like asp.net and switch to apache + mono.

To be fair though, the parent I was replying to did not define in what capacity .net would be replaced and how and taking replies as a black and white answer to a gray area question is a bit factitious (this part was not meant as a directly reply to the parent of this reply).

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