Can you build a startup on .Net?

Re:Can you build a startup on .Net? by untog on Monday April 16, 2012 @02:39PM (#3848668)

Of course you can. People spend far, far too much time worrying about what programming language they should use for their project. You should not spend your time learning Ruby/node.js/Scala, you should launch your MVP with what you know.

If you have to, you can change later- though from experience, there's little need to with .NET. I work for RecordSetter (http://www.recordsetter.com) and we use ASP.NET MVC- back in the early days of the company, the CTO knew .NET very well, so he just used his existing knowledge. C# is a great language, Visual Studio is a great IDE, MVC is a great framework. And so on and so on. We aren't really suffering any ill effects as a result of our choice, and as others have noted, BizSpark membership is actually a great bonus.

If anyone out there wants to play around with C# for the web but feels like the ASP.NET stack is too heavy (it can be), take a look at Nancy.FX (http://www.nancyfx.org/). It's super lightweight and allows you to keep most of .NET out of your way.

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Re:Can you build a startup on .Net? by web_chops on Monday April 16, 2012 @03:51PM (#3849025)

I really love NancyFx. It's such a well thought out framework. If there is some feature missing, all you have to do is hook at the proper place. It really simplified building our startup (http://designduke.com). Best part is that using a REST framework encourages you to move out most of the logic and functionality to client and it scales pretty well.

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Re:Can you build a startup on .Net? by friism on Monday April 16, 2012 @05:05PM (#3849435)

Have you considered running on AppHarbor instead of raw EC2? Nancy works great on our platform.

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Re:Can you build a startup on .Net? by option_greek on Monday April 16, 2012 @06:01PM (#3849694)

Do you have any link that compares performance of workers to EC2 instance types (for a raw idea of how much power an existing app needs) ? Also, how does deployment to IIS server and running multiple custom executables for various other tasks workout on your platform.. I mean can a worker run multiple applications ?

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Re:Can you build a startup on .Net? by friism on Monday April 16, 2012 @08:30PM (#3850279)

We haven't made any direct comparisons, but AppHarbor web workers are very fast and can handle upwards of 200 reqeusts/second for cached responses of moderate size. For non-ASP.NET workloads, we offer background workers: http://blog.appharbor.com/2012/03/08/background-workers-in-b...

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Re:Can you build a startup on .Net? by rudyl on Monday April 16, 2012 @02:50PM (#3848726)

So is recordsetter still on ASP.Net MVC?

Regarding the language doesn't matter thing I think that's mostly true. If you're choosing between Ruby and ASP.Net MVC I don't think you can loose. But sometimes the framework does matter, like if you want to build a startup on webforms (don't).

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Re:Can you build a startup on .Net? by untog on Monday April 16, 2012 @02:56PM (#3848755)

Yep, we're still on MVC.

I think you're right about WebForms in the sense that I can't think of a single good reason to go with it over MVC. I maintain that it was never really intended for the web we use these days anyway.

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Re:Can you build a startup on .Net? by radicalbyte on Monday April 16, 2012 @04:03PM (#3849089)

> I maintain that it was never really intended > for the web we use these days anyway.

It was designed to make web development "simple" for the kind of people who built WinForms applications and were too lazy to learn how the web actually works.

Thankfully Microsoft have learnt from their errors so are now pushing these types towards making a mess of Javascript. Visual Basic types will be happy to learn that semicolons are optional.

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Re:Can you build a startup on .Net? by rudyl on Monday April 16, 2012 @03:02PM (#3848783)

I agree. I used to do classic ASP, which at the time was a great web dev platform. I really think Microsofts priority with Webforms was to convert all those VB6 programmers over to the new framework, not build a better web framework. I've hated webforms from day 1. I'll dance on it's grave.

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