Building a Web-App the Microsoft Way

<i>"Possibly the main argument against using Microsoft from the open source point of view has been the issue of expense. However the .NET Framework can be downloaded for free plus they also provide ‘Express’ versions of Visual Studio and their SQL Server database software which we used and are also free."</i><p>This only addresses the <i>development</i> versions of their software. What about license costs for the production instances of Windows Server and SQL Server? That's where costs really start getting prohibitive on an MS stack. For a startup at least.

The Microsoft platform has worked very well for Loopt as well, though I can't claim we're good enough to have had only two bugs since launch :)<p>As for cost, we spend less on software licensing per year than we do for our least compensated employee by a substantial margin. We've also had no issues with security thus far (fingers crossed).

Microsoft has done some good work in the last couple of years at making their tools suck a lot less for web development. ASP.NET MVC, a newer framework with a Rails-like approach, is also coming along nicely.<p>Honestly, the main reason most ASP.NET websites suck so badly is that the Microsoft tries to make its tools accessible to developers who don't want to bother to learn and use web standards, and when used by the standards-oblivious, the resulting web apps are generally very poor in the standards compliance department.

ASP.NET and C# has worked well for Workpost so far. We were able to get version 1.0 online quickly and any issues we've had lately are not related to the platform.<p>Scaling will be a difficult (but welcome) problem though SQL Server does not have to cost quite as much as most people think it does.<p>Microsoft could, however, offer more incentives and assistance to startups who choose to use their platform. They've made a lot of progress in the last few years toward being more developer-friendly but they need to go even further.<p>Finding talented ASP.NET / C# developers willing to work on startups can also also a challenge.

I work .NET in my day job and Rails at night. I feel way more productive working in Rails that in .NET, even though I don't know the Ruby language as well as C# or VB.NET.

I'm interested in playing with the Microsoft stack a bit more, for the usual reasons people play with languages they don't work with. Can anyone recommend a sweet spot to aim at (is ASP.NET MVC really usable yet?) and maybe a book or guide?<p>When I wrote a sample client to accompany a web service I'd developed, I used VS2005 and a Sams "ASP.NET in 24 hours" book. I suspect seasoned MS stack people would recommend something else.

microsoft way is not very sportsman like