Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

There is a strong perception (whether accurate or not--and I honestly don't know the answer) that it's the same old story with Microsoft: if you go the .NET route, you've gotta buy into the entire Microsoft ecosystem. It's not just .NET that you're choosing; you're also choosing Windows servers, IIS, Visual Studio, etc.<p>If that perception is accurate, it's entirely reasonable to say, "Despite liking a lot of what .NET has to offer, we don't want to buy into one specific company's ecosystem that deeply."<p>If that perception is inaccurate, then there should be some serious marketing around changing that perception (and not just from MS--but more like this type of grass-roots post).

Our startup is based on .Net and hosted on Azure. I don't think I realized just how uncommon this was until we were invited to Microsoft in Redmond and saw the excitement from the developers when they learned that we were a startup.<p>We love the framework. But its definitely not the only stack we use. I also agree that there are <i>bad</i> .Net developers that spoil it for the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the issues seem to be associated with ASP.Net and claiming to be a web developer without understanding how the web actually works. Many of them are so into just using the tools that they never bother to learn Javascript and instead insist on doing Postbacks for everything.<p>I feel that we're starting to see a new side of Microsoft when it comes to the web and startups.<p>Things like ASP.Net MVC, Azure and BizSpark give me hope.

With rails or php, developers can use the editor and the OS they want. With .net, you're "forced" to use Visual Studio and Windows.<p>Also, I feel like .net teams are a bit <i>closed</i> to the rest of the programming community. Lots of C#/C++ programmers think that everything that is not C#/C++ is a joke or a little scripting language. "Omg, I would never build my 2D game on Python and save 100 hours" - says the C++ developer.<p>Also, startups and big companies think and act really differently. The mentality of a startup is: "Go faster!!" while the big company is: "Don't screw up or you're out". I know it's not <i>that</i> black and white, that's just a simple way to say it. But basically, the python philosophy is "Programmers are smart and they'll do their best to use the library correctly" while the C++/C# mentality is: "Imagine that an idiot will use your library so play it as safe and defensive as possible".<p>Finally, I feel like C# is like a big package deal. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like it'd be hard to use CoffeeScript or Compass (for instance) with a C# project. And, it's not <i>that</i> much about the technology, but the mentality of the big company. From my experience, I know that had I told my boss: "I'll use CoffeeScript", he wouldn't have understood why.

I don't know about startups. I work for a mid-sized company.<p>I consider open source to be a better choice in my discussions for these reasons:<p>* Vendor lock-in avoidance. This can induce some pretty harsh long-term effects, especially with maintenance fees, inflexible users, and data isolation.<p>* Code escrow. If your customers are relying on a particular component being available for you, it's not a really good thing if that component is 'disappeared' by an API rev. Open source provides trivial code escrow facilities.<p>* Speed of development. Open source projects seem to move faster than enterprise-level software.<p>* Company risk: there's no risk of the source code simply going away because the company folded or was bought out. If needed, we can maintain an open-source component if it's that critical.<p>* Standards-compliance: most open source seems to think about standards more.<p>* 'Wave of The Future': many novel developments are in open source. If we make sure to ride that wave, we won't obsolete ourselves by locking to a single company.<p>These reasons all relate to software maintenance and agility in some fashion. Being able to maintain software and to shift platforms (when appropriate) is important. Open source allows those qualities to be there more than non-open source, in my opinion.<p>I have seen enough Java/MS revs pass through that I don't think it would be professional to recommend solutions based on those platforms, in general.<p>Best wishes to those those do venture out onto the churny waters, though.

I use both .NET and the LAMP stack everyday. I love .NET and C# is a beautiful language. But I have to use Windows to use .NET. There is nothing wrong with Windows, except it doesn't have a very good shell; it doesn't come with the GNU user land; I can't just grep and sed and awk on one line to solve problems and answer questions; when I google for help with stuff like mysql I don't find near as many answers that would apply to windows; I can't just type "apt-get install ..." somewhere to try out a new programming language or other large program for free; I can't solve problems with SSH. All of these problems can be solved to a large extent, but not in a well known, well documented and Free way. Maybe that's just a matter of culture, but until the not-artificially-limited version of Windows can be downloaded for free, I can't give it a fair try.

Another answer is it's because most startups are consumer web-focused and MS traditionally hasn't been.<p>ASP.NET was traditionally an enterprise framework. Which got long in the tooth. ASP.NET MVC is quite good, but probably just caught up with the leading FOSS with MVC 3. Give it a year. And in general people aren't doing startups for desktops anymore, although they're still huge in the enterprise, which is why .NET is bigger in the enterprise than for startups.<p>The other big space for startups is mobile, but MS isn't big here at the moment. Why are startups using Cocoa now? Well because iOS is huge. If WP7 becomes huge, guess what happens? C# becomes a hot language for startups.<p>The author of the referenced blog (not the Piehead one) clearly doesn't understand that domains tend to dominate language. And further doesn't seem to understand that you try to pick the best tool for the job. A manager begrudging you for selecting the best tool for the job is not someone you'd want to work for.

<i>The real answer is just as much about our industry’s culture as it is about technology. </i><p>No, it's <i>entirely</i> about our industry's culture. Which is a shame. It's a fantastic framework that should and could supplant the JVM. It never will though, thanks to Microsoft's boneheaded choices and the blog posts like 'Why I don't hire .Net developers'.

A couple years ago when I was working for a mostly rails shop, We built a medium sized e-commerce system in .NET MVC.<p>It was our first C# project (though we'd done java before). It was actually quite nice.<p>.NET MVC is, as some others have mentioned, a rather shameless rip off of Rails-style mvc, but they did a good job, and they published the source, which is handy.<p>C# is pretty nice, after working with it I actually prefer it to Java.<p>When we finished the project we were so pleased with the .NET MVC stack that we tried to see how we could make it work for other projects, but it came down to tools and platform:<p>We had to run windows for development and deployment if we wanted to run Visual Studio and IIS. VS is a decent IDE, but having a *nix system is necessary for literally every other thing we do, which meant we were either running windows in virtualization or dual booting (we have no desire to run linux virtualized for development).<p>We looked into the mono tools, but trying to get our code running there was an exercise in translation: all the tutorials and documentation are focused on the windows world, so it's difficult to find resources for working with .NET on mono for web development.<p>In the end, .NET MVC is nice, but it's not such a game-changer that we were willing to put up with the windows-centric toolchain and, just as importantly, the windows-centric culture surrounding it. Unfortunately I can't see Microsoft making the effort to push it to a wider audience.

I'd love to use C# or F# for development: they're in my opinion, superior languages to Java and Scala (respectively) -- although Scala has several salient and interesting points (implicits, traits) that F# doesn't.<p>However, I am fairly well wed to Linux/OS X, and don't see myself being productive with Windows (whenever I used Windows, the first application I'd install is Cygwin), nor (having never done Windows Systems Engineering) do I know how to find a great SRE/operations engineer for a Windows system (or how to train a great Linux SRE to be a great Windows SRE). Nor can I legally setup a small cluster of Windows Server machines in my apartment (or on Ec2) to prototype the application _before_ I officially start a company (and qualify for bizpark) without paying extra costs. Ditto for setting up a developer desktop with MS Visual Studio.<p>I am watching Mono seriously, but for now I'd stick to C++, Erlang/OTP, OCaml, and Java/Scala as my choices (with Python or Ruby for scripting) were I to start a new project.<p>Addendum:<p>Microsoft: if you're reading this, buy Miguel De Icaza's startup. Make Linux and OS X a first class side deployment platform. Market SQL Server (which, from what I recall is superior to it's primary competitor, which is Oracle) as a way to "upsell" customers using Mono on Linux to use Windows Server (if it makes business sense for them).

Why wouldn't a startup that I start use .NET? Because it's too late. The time to catch me was 5-10 years ago - when I was a middle school/high school code monkey playing with the Linux/GNU/gcc stack.<p>Now it's simply too late. Sure, I could and would invest time and money if your stack was orders of magnitude better. And I often do learn and use new stacks (the ML family; common Lisp) if they happen to be by far the right environment for the problem at hand. But if .NET is just "Java, but a little better", it's really not worth my time.

I think the Achilles Heel for .NET is Windows - the only way using .NET to develop makes any sense is to use Visual Studio, and to use Visual Studio, you need to use Windows. And that's a hard sell for a lot of people - most people in the startup scene use Mac OS X or Linux, and one of the reasons why is contempt of Windows. In many ways, .NET is better than Java, but I can't seriously consider using it if it's tied to Windows.

.Net doesn't make sense for most web startups no matter how good it is. Why?<p>* The floss stack is good enough (sometimes better) and more flexible. Can scale up as well as out: <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/scaling-up-vs-scaling-out-hidden-costs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/scaling-up-vs-scali...</a><p>* Unix is more elegant as a headless networked server, as it was designed that way since the early 70's.<p>* Researching bizspark will never beat the efficiency of: sudo apt-get install postgres<p>* AKA, time spent worrying about licensing, product codes, and activation is time wasted.<p>* EC2 (for example) charges ~25% more for Windows thanks to license fees.<p>The choice between (free, freedom, and elegant), almost always beats (cheap, restricted, and (at times) clumsy)). If there is an aspect to your startup that makes .net a better fit, by all means. But to act as if it is a good solution for the average startup (that intends to grow rapidly) does the community a disservice.<p>I'd go so far as to say that the "Web 2.0" boom owes its existence to the combination of the floss stack and cheap commodity hardware. In the 90's it took millions to do what today takes thousands (or even hundreds).

As a Microsoft developer for more than a decade I can say without a doubt the biggest complaint is that you operate on Microsoft's schedule. If they say LINQ to SQL is dead. It's dead. If they say, you must build Windows apps using XAML, you have to use XAML. I've had to learn at least 5 different data access frameworks over the years.<p>What I've learned is that core functionality (like arrays, strings, math libraries, etc.) are great but when you adopt higher level Microsoft frameworks (like authentication in ASP.NET) you have to be prepared that at some future point MS will pull the plug.<p>Open source projects can integrate very well with .NET but if you're starting from scratch at a startup I don't think there is a huge value in the tool chain the Microsoft offers v. OSS tool chain.

-Not OSS (note I didn't include the F)<p>-Cross-browser pains<p>-Vendor lockin (getting better with mono, but not officially supported by MS)<p>-Non-(f)OSS tools or less (F)OSS tools<p>-Non-OSS risk (can't patch if needed)<p>-No support for WebGL/other html5 tech<p>-Useless pushing of Silverlight while industry shifts to HTML5

<p><pre><code> However, Microsoft has been running their Bizspark program for a few years, which eliminates most of the startup costs normally associated with employing a .NET framework. </code></pre> The problem with BizSpark is that it is a ticking time bomb.<p>When starting a business, you don't really know what will happen in 3 years, but only one thing is certain -- the path to success usually takes more than 3 years.<p>And unless you've got VC money to burn irresponsibly, why build on top of a stack that you'll probably have to replace? Does it provide more value than the alternatives? When it comes to web services, all evidence is to the contrary.<p><pre><code> At Piehead, we build web applications on a faster pace than almost any startup </code></pre> This is an unsupported anecdotal evidence.<p>It also seems incorrect based on the sheer number of businesses I've seen doing kick-ass work with non-MS technologies.<p><pre><code> programmers start to choose technologies based on that cultural perception, rather than focusing on the best approach for the kinds software they want to build </code></pre> This implies that .NET is the best approach for certain kinds of software - the article does nothing to name them. Which is IMHO, not the best way to advocate for the usage of .NET.<p>And again, all evidence is to the contrary - most popular web-services online are not built with MS technologies, with a few exceptions that you could count by using the fingers on one hand. And what else, other than ASP.NET-powered web applications? For client-apps targeted to consumers? For mobile apps? Again, all evidence is to the contrary.<p>Besides the price and the interoperability story - another reason would be that Microsoft is currently a follower.<p>Besides a couple of exceptions, which are small in scope, Microsoft currently does nothing but to copy ideas taken from (shock and horror) open-source projects. Sorry, but innovation happens somewhere else.<p>I also like being able to be in control. Even if I don't know the internals of some component I'm using, I like being able getting in touch with the core developers of that component and ask them nicely or pay them directly to fix it for me. And if that component is valuable to me, I also like being able to improve it myself.<p>Open-source gives you that, Microsoft software doesn't.

I'm using rails for my company but ruby is definitely not my preferred language. Blocks/Procs/Lambdas (why are there three almost identical constructs?) definitely don't compare to function application / currying. I'd much rather write in F# but I'm worried about all the nice to haves that come with the rails stack, like capistrano or the plugins to serve/upload your assets to S3. (e.g. ASP.NET has HAML but not sass)<p>I definitely foresee at some point switching to ASP.NET in a similar manner as twitter is moving over to the JVM / Scala, but rails still has a lot of legs in it for us.

I've been a .NET developer for close to 10 years. Our last product (UsabilityHub.com) was written in .NET simply because it is what I know.<p>In reality it doesn't matter how good .NET is, there are two reasons why we didn't use it for our latest venture (BugHerd.com).<p>1) .NET is always one step behind. When people say .NET for web apps, they really mean MVC. I love it, but the reality is that it's a .NET implementation of what was long since done elsewhere. .NET will always be a step behind. Although I must say, sometimes being the second to implement something is a good thing for stability.<p>2) Hiring .NET developers means hiring enterprise developers. A huge generalisation here, but that means engineers that have worked in big teams under constant direction. They don't do open source, they don't read other people's code and they aren't used to working autonomously.

Agree on the culture thing. Wrote a blog post about a year ago: <a href="http://www.softwaresweden.com/2010/04/28/picking-a-programming-language-based-on-personality/" rel="nofollow">http://www.softwaresweden.com/2010/04/28/picking-a-programmi...</a><p>"They don’t tell you this in school, but there’s a certain organizational personality connected to each language... It’s not a matter of the powers of the languages themselves but how they are used and who uses them and what kind of projects will you be doing with the language."

I dunno. I get confused, easily. Every few weeks something like this kicks around, I get tricked into saying something unfortunate (but true) about the MS development community, no one changes their mind and the process repeats.<p>I guess what I keep forgetting to ask is why <i>should</i> I ever consider using .NET for a server side application? I'm totally boggled as to why it's not just a redundant, expensive, risky idea compared to the legions of alternatives. That's very different than suggesting the language or platform is bad... They're not at all. In fact, I think they're great. I just don't understand what makes them worth the trade-offs that come along with signing up.

Closed source. If it breaks (really breaks) I (or anyone without a Microsoft badge) can't fix it. And if they do fix it, it will take a while for the patch to get to me. Pretty simple if you ask me.

It all goes back to everything Microsoft offers is tightly coupled to Microsoft's ecosystem, and frankly I've played in that space for years and just got bored of it, plus I got tired of investing in learning Microsoft-specific APIs that Microsoft itself kept obsoleting.<p>Nothing really new or interesting is happening in Microsoftland. Instead every new offering is just an incompatible counter-offer to some other established technology (eg. Silverlight vs. Flash, .NET vs. Java, Windows Passport vs. OAuth, and so on). Boring.<p>Perhaps the only area Microsoft has truly offered anything new and interesting is DirectX but I'm not a game developer so I don't have any use for it.

As much as we like to think of ourselves as cold and calculated, able to cut through emotions when making decisions, more often than not we're just like everybody else.

My startup uses .Net which I chose for the basic reason that I know it very well and I didn't have time to go learn something else while I was trying to get work done. Any server I add is in response to more paying customers so the cost doesn't matter at all. It cuts into the margin a little but I only add new servers when we add a lot of new business. The initial cost of VS.Net was annoying but it wasn't bad and I was able to run off of SQL Server 2008 Express for a very long time.

It's just a perception. Use whatever tool/framework/service that work for your situation.<p>My latest project was a Windows Phone 7 app with a backend written in Python, hosted on Google AppEngine and using Google's Bigtable database.<p>A few years ago, for my startup, I used asp.net mvc for the web app and joomla (php) for the website because they had great themes.<p>So, open your mind and try different things, you will be surprised how much you will learn. But honestly, there is NOTHING that can't be done in either platforms. Technology is really irrelevant. Look at wordpress and facebook. Look at basecamp, look at office live and google office... Look at the crappy objective-c ecosystem and the awesome apps that were built with it.

I've done development with ASP.Net on Windows/Windows Server/IIS/etc., and I just simply don't prefer it to Python/Django/Linux.<p>C# is a great language, but I find the point and click/cmd.exe solution to not be as robust and quick as a *nix command line.<p>Visual Studio is a great tool but it has its quirks, complexities, and bugs.<p>The .NET stack has a lot of potential for web development (MVC being the shining example), but there are so many technologies that make up the stack that it can be overwhelming. It also doesn't help that they are all sold as being equal but that developers in the know would tell you to avoid most of them (WCF/Web Methods/Web Service files/Web Forms/etc).

The issue i think is 2 fold:<p>1) MS technology is designed as if no other exist - it aims to be a self contained ecosystem. It is the ultimate lock-in.<p>2) MS business practices - after the last 10 years i think many technologists will never trust them again.

What about the reputation of MS amongst the developer community? Eg. Stability of Windows (reboots over weekends to free up memory), countless hours spent cursing MS for IE6 etc. IMHO that's also a major factor.

That biz sparks program is like a drug dealer giving free samples... yeh u get a free copy of visual studio, but then you got to pay if you exceed any of these requirements...<p><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/</a><p>Privately held? Less than three years old? Making less than US $1M annually?

&#62; As a result, programmers start to choose technologies based on that cultural perception, rather than focusing on the best approach for the kinds software they want to build.<p>This seems to imply that cultural issues don't affect the way the software is built. In my mind it's the #1 factor.

To be honest, I think one of the biggest problems with using a Microsoft stack is licensing. With Linux/OSS infrastructure the only limit in terms of flexibility is your imagination. Want a server? All you need to buy is the hardware. Want to change the OS on a server? Just takes time and effort. Want to change your infrastructure from a few big iron boxes to 10x as many smaller boxes? Again, just time and effort and hardware costs.<p>In contrast, with an MS stack you have licensing and purchasing friction at every step. You get mired with infrastructure inertia, you don't want to waste the money you've spent on buying OS/database licenses, you don't want to spend new money on new licenses. Even when the money isn't very consequential (and in most operations it's not) the mere fact that budgeting has to be involved in so many technical changes often reduces flexibility and development velocity. For example, what if you want to merely investigate a potential new server configuration? With Linux you can perhaps find some older hardware and spend some time prototyping a new system, and if it doesn't work you've wasted time but you've at least learned something. With Windows you have to commit money before you've completed your test.

I think it's a community problem. Stackoverflow is the closest thing to a vibrant .NET community that I've ever seen, and that's not saying much. Despite the massive enterprise buy-in, it's very lonely place to be sometimes.<p>Nothing really exciting happens in .NET.

&#62;Essentially, the cost differences have become moot.<p>What? Have you seen these prices? <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx</a><p>That's just SQL Server for god's sake.

As an enterprise software stack, .NET may be fine and competitive. However, the reasons that make it a good enterprise stack work against it in the startup space.<p>Take the example of a web page returning JSON. In Rails there's a prescribed way to do this. It is generally straight forward and one gets it done literally after 5 minutes of tutorials.<p>In .NET, you have to install the WCF REST stack, learn about endpoints, bindings, the difference between Raw, and wrapped formats, then there are authorization behaviors (tokens, windows integrated etc etc). Mess around with service hosts in IIS and then pray it works. With everything being pluggable, there is no simple prescriptive method to get code working and moving on to the next feature. The stack is so complicated that blog posts even by MS employees contain errors which stay uncorrected. I have spent two days trying to figure out what is the best practice for uploading a large file to a web service and the combination of options are simply bewildering and with so many parts one wonders if it is going to work at all.<p>Now imagine this struggle being repeated in every aspect of your development. You will spend the day stepping through Factories and Hosts and Locators using Reflector.exe before finding the little bit of code that does what you want. Then you swear at MS because it is marked "internal" and you can't monkey patch it.<p>This syndrome is in part due to the size of Microsoft. MS would never dare release software that wasn't pluggable because it has a big audience and big audiences want a clear delineation between what is their code and what is maintained by Microsoft. The startup ecosystem just wants to hack code until it works and get things done. No startup developer can really devote the necessary time to the study of large software stacks before sending out a piece of string.<p>MS has done an outstanding back-to-basics job with WebMatrix and its PHP-like simplicity. However, it is still a long way behind in other respect.<p>For example, MS doesn't cultivate a community the way open source projects do. There is no central place to find able consultants, or centralized Planet-style feeds, or given provide a site where users can contribute tutorials. The employees are answering forums in their free time (I saw some post at midnight, and this is devotion, but the msdn forums are literary broken - you can see the answers being doubled up in the rendered page but no one fixes them). The experience simply reeks of helplessness on the poor MS-employees' part because someone else in the company has created such a shitty place for developer interaction.

At Busfeed.com all our systems and App are build on Microsoft platform and .Net framework. The MS BizSpark program is a winner for us and many startups we know. The icing on the cake: it’s waaaaay easier to hire Microsoft professionals on the east coast than for any other platform out there.<p>I think the ability to find and hire good developers is the most underrated factor in tools for startups.

&#62; [...] don’t look for PHP programmers or .NET programmers, look for programmers with experience on a variety of platforms.<p>This isn't mutually exclusive.<p>.NET is just a tool. Perhaps it should instead be rephrased and generalized: don't look for programmers who <i>only</i> have experience with X. But that's still a different argument.

I am a knee-jerk Microsoft hater (with reasons I won't bore you with). Last fall I saw a bank developer giving a demo of how to build a system using F# and accessing the the windows GUIs library on .Net. I have to say it was very, very nice and powerful. I was half tempted...

In my experience Windows ops/admins don't have anywhere near the depth nor breadth of infrastructure knowledge that *nix ppl do, and I have yet to meet a .NET web developer who knew anything about OS internals.<p>I'm not ragging on MS devs, just an observation from personal experience. The well-roundedness of the FOSS based software engineers makes them a much better suit for startups than MS people. I don't believe technology superiority really comes into it.

This is interesting. More startup ar using .Net than I would have thought (including mine).<p>We should create a separate thread to list/show our stuff (for those ready to show).

Is there a way to learn .NET stack without downloading lots of stuff/having a student license/licensing things?<p>I do like C# and have used it for Uni projects in the past, but I've done much more work in Python because starting out in it was as simple as typing "python", or making webapps is as simple as apt-getting or easy_installing a framework and doing a simple tutorial. What is the equivalent of, say, the Flask tutorial, for .NET?

Hey all, I'm the original author and I saw this popup, so I figured I post a quick comment.<p>A lot of people have pointed out that I didn't really include and example of a start-up using, which is a legit point. If you're interested in seeing a good example, check out <a href="http://stackoverflow.com" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com</a> They're a great example of a company that's very open about their experiences with .NET (both good and bad) and they generally post them on their blog at <a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/aspnet/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/aspnet/</a><p>If you have specific questions, feel free to reply and I will do my best to answer them.

IMO, Open Source is what is going to save the .NET as a startup option, things like Nancy, OWIN, Kayak, SimpleData, Dapper are building an entire web stack without any Microsoft owned product.

PHP and ruby are simpler and easier to use for non-enterprise webapps (particularly with RoR, and Sinatra being simpler again).<p>Like JSON being favoured for simpler uses where XML is not required (it lacks schema, references and namespaces).<p>The usual trajectory is for technology to improve. PHP and ruby and JSON are becoming better at meeting the needs of their specific users. It's harder for a highly sophisticated technology, like .NET, to become <i>simpler</i> (though they've been much better at this than Java).

Lock-in is a bit of a myth, or more precisely, everything "locks you in". If you start with a LAMP stack, or Rails, or .Net it's going to be very expensive to change that once your business is off the ground. This is because the main costs are developer time and time-to-market/opportunity costs.<p>Regardless of platform, a wholesale rewrite is rarely viable. Facebook is still on PHP, and have had to take heroic measures to avoid moving to another language.

The writer of this awful article obviously has not done much web development programming, because if he had, he'd know that microsoft is atrocious in every respect.<p>Microsoft has its own standards, its own way of doing things. Microsoft does not "play nice". When I code a site that needs to be compatable with all browsers, I need seperate code for ie6, ie7, and ie8. They all interpret code and standards a bit differently, leading to page inconsistancies.<p>And now, this jerk says we are supposed to embrace microsoft and program in .net? Is this guy out of his fucking mind? Simply program anything thats actually going to be useful and require cross compatability, and you will quickly see why microsoft is looked down upon by ACTUAL developers, hated, and is known across the lands as a large piece of garbage.<p>For how little microsoft has done for the open source community, for how long it takes for microsoft to issue simple updates, for how many years certain browser bugs were hanging around; I would never, ever, ever, support that company.<p>The mere thought of a startup company using .net is laughable. Anytime I hear any company using .net, all I can think of is some high up executive got schwindled, and it is up to the low level developers to turn a massive pile of shit, into something useful.

In the local Twin Cities startup scene I have seen several .NET startups. But rather than make me question my feelings about .NET it has made me question the local tech scene. (FWIW a lot of these are around medicine, which may be a healthcare IT culture instead of an internet culture)

This is the least substantive article I've seen make it to the top of HN in a long time.

plentyoffish.com the worlds largest dating site is based on M$ tech