Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

http://tumblr.com/xzh1ixatl0

by hughesdan • 15 years ago

87 130 15 years ago

tumblr.com

noonespecial3• 15 years ago

The people who come along later to scale to those millions of users your site attracted might.

cfinke• 15 years ago

Is there any (standard) technology stack that has proven to be unscalable?

j_baker9• 15 years ago

Yes. The one you started out with is always unscalable.

mkr-hn• 15 years ago

I recall twitter originally being written in something that proved unscalable, so they had to switch. Can't remember what it was though.

tejaswiy• 15 years ago

This is what I don't get. ASP.NET scales pretty well as Joel opines. Why do people think .NET is bad just because it feels enterprise-y?

More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ

kondro9• 15 years ago

You're right, .NET (even though I despise it) scales as well as anything else. Scalability is much more about design decisions than language/platform choice.

However, Joel Spolsky is a tool. Everyone I know and respect thinks he's a tool. He is a prime example of being successful because of being lucky, rather than being good. Do not quote Joel, he can't form a valid argument for a topic without circling back on himself to save his life.

noonespecial3• 15 years ago

My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact.

It really is all about the initial design not the language. ASP.NET just makes it too easy to go with bad design and library choices, not to mention the tons of examples of bad design that newbies might accidentally follow at the beginning.

dennisgorelik2• 15 years ago

Thanks -- it's such a good talk. The final Q&A section of the talk is the best Q&A I ever saw. Aside of tons of insights Joel was gently picking up on Googlers (e.g. by doing search using Bing).

nostrademons7• 15 years ago

You almost always have to rewrite your whole system anyway to scale to millions of users. It doesn't matter whether it's PHP, Python, C++, or ASP.NET; it'll have to be rewritten.

The real problem is the flip-side of something that the OP mentioned as an advantage: ASP.NET coders tend to be cheaper, less experienced, and hence less likely to know about some critical detail that'll boost adoption, whether it's usability or latency or security. As someone relatively inexperienced himself, the OP can't know what those things are, but it's highly likely that one of them will bite him.

In other words, it's correlation, not causation. ASP.NET won't make your site suck. However, ASP.NET biases your talent pool towards developers who suck, and that will make your site suck.

mwdev2• 15 years ago

To me this sounds like my friends who didn't want to go to UT because it 'was too big'. The awesome thing about too big is that if you look hard enough you are almost assured of finding someone like you.

Yes there are crappy c# developers. I've also seen some bad ass c#.

benologist• 15 years ago

I'm curious how you conclude that ASP.NET developers suck ... there's a lot of shit programmers in all languages out there, that's why everyone's looking hard to find the rockstars/ninjas/whatevers.

treenyc• 15 years ago

Not if you use http://helma.org (SSJS), it has a build in ORM that caches results. 1 machine 2 GB ram serves 30 million hits per month.

blake8086• 15 years ago

Perhaps you would be interested in purchasing my Scaling Insurance?

It costs a ton upfront, and it's likely to kill your nascent company, but if you ever make it big, you'll save a tiny bit of money in the long run!

arethuza7• 15 years ago

Call them Scaling Default Swaps - insurance is regulated!

j_baker9• 15 years ago

I disagree. For starters, I care what I build my site in. I'd have a lot more fun using say python or (if I'm lucky) lisp or Haskell than I would using PHP. And more fun = easier.

Secondly, developers who might join your company are going to care. Developers are more than the technologies on their resumes. Good ones can learn new technologies quickly. And they might even be happier learning something new.

This view is typical of business people. There isn't anything wrong with that, and it's necessary to a certain degree. But as he scales up, I hope that he can find someone who can help him make a more informed technical decision.

(And for the record, this isn't necessarily targeted at ASP.NET. I can think of worse technologies to work with)

krisrak• 15 years ago

It does not matter what you build, you can achieve the same with using either PHP, Python, Ruby or ASP.NET. I choose Python/Google App Engine, free hosting is what was important for me, so I learnt a bit of Python to build me sites http://initlabs.com

j_baker9• 15 years ago

I agree. From the standpoint of what you can build a product using alone, any one of those is a good choice. However, I've learned that readability, along with being fun and efficient (from a developer productivity standpoint), is important, and the language makes a huge impact on all of these. I would argue that you can make say PHP readable, but it isn't necessarily going to be fun or efficient (but if someone can get all of those things, more power to them).

xpaulbettsx2• 15 years ago

"And more fun = easier."

That's the thing though - you and I think programming is fun and awesome, whereas this guy thinks business is fun and awesome, and programming is just a means to do what he wants to.

What I think is a valuable lesson here though, is that he stayed focused on his goal of "put out the site", whereas with hackers it's easy to have a real goal of "Use technology X and write some awesome code" with a tertiary goal of "ship a product". Always be focused on getting your product out the door, even if you don't make perfect technical decisions.

j_baker9• 15 years ago

Hey, wait a minute. Just what are you trying to say here? That business and technical people do better working together than ignoring each other? Next you'll tell me business people are human beings and not drones some cruel hacker made to torment other hackers.

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

> Secondly, developers who might join your company are going to care.

He pretty much covered that by talking about the cool kids, and about the space he's in being about bodies.

His goals probably depend more on having average work done steadily than awesome work done when it's cool to do.

barista• 15 years ago

If you are hacking just for the sake of hacking then you are absolutely right. You should choose the technology based on how fun it is. But soon you will need to worry about how to pay the server and the bandwidth invoices. That time the business people's opinion will probably sound better.

Even for hacking, it is generally better to choose the technology that your core set of technical people are most comfortable with.

kondro9• 15 years ago

As a newbie, you are as likely to write shit asp.net code as you are any other code.

mwdev2• 15 years ago

I'm doing the same. I'll give a shout out to appharbor. They have made it insanely easy and cheap(as in free) to deploy a .net app.

...and here is a little secret that they may or may not want you to know...if you don't have the MS tools, it doesn't really matter. You don't even have to have windows. They build the code for you. You could used notepad to write an ASP.net app on their platform. Push. Test. Repeat.

xpaulbettsx2• 15 years ago

Yep - and MonoDevelop will run ASP.NET just fine on any platform, or just use gVim and make

staunch• 15 years ago

The right answer is almost always to go with what you know best. As long as what you know best isn't completely ridiculous it will be the least of your problems.

jfm3• 15 years ago

Article should be called "I should not have built my site in ASP.NET, but it's too late now, so I'm going to rationalize it as follows."

makmanalp• 15 years ago

> It’s not about the quality of the talent. It’s a simple supply and demand question.

Uh oh. "Programmers are a commodity" again.

hughesdan• 15 years ago

I was trying to make the point that from my vantage point the talent pools are deep in each camp. Bad choice of words on my part.

alnayyir2• 15 years ago

>the talent pools are deep in each camp

That doesn't really matter if in the PHP and .NET world you have to filter through 10,000 people to find somebody of the same median grade as you'd find in haskell/python/ruby/clojure.

I'm exaggerating for effect, but the take-home here is that if you don't have unlimited resources you need to have some way to differentiate and filter from the guys offering the sweet vacation packages and steady career options.

How exactly are you differentiating and filtering for higher quality people if not by technologies and developer freedom?

Do you have nice offices ala 37signals?

Are you an advocate of developer 'rights' such as Joel has been known to enumerate?

Why exactly should a dev tolerate using VisualStudio and Windows for the sake of working on your company?

danshapiro2• 15 years ago

Lots of things that you or I think are unique and special can be modeled as commodities. VCs model startups as commodities when they're preparing forecasts. Recruiters model high powered executives as commodities when they're preparing an interview pipeline. Like all abstractions, it's sometimes useful, and sometimes misleading. Certainly it's nothing worth getting excited about as a passing comment by the author.

nostrademons7• 15 years ago

I'm not quite sure that VCs model startups as commodities, considering that you get these huge pile-ons where everyone wants to invest in Twitter or Zynga but nobody wants to invest in the random startup your roommate founded. If startups actually behaved as commodities, brand names wouldn't matter so much.

Ditto high-powered executives - if they were actually commodities, executive pay wouldn't skyrocket through the roof.

groby_b• 15 years ago

Whatever you chose - is it really a good plan to write an article that amounts to "my startup was written by somebody who's new to coding in general. And the whole point is to flip it" ?

(Yes, I believe "exit strategy" is a fancy word for "built to flip".)

jonpaul• 15 years ago

Although I agree with the point that customers don't give a shit about the technology stack, did it seem to anyone else that he may be a little self-conscious about his choice of choosing ASP.NET? Read every single point. They all mention why he chose ASP.NET.

Edit: why the downvotes? I'm not saying that ASP.NET is a bad language. I'm just saying that his title doesn't agree with what he wrote.

jswinghammer• 15 years ago

I think ASP.Net is a pretty smart move even if you do have a strong CS background and know a few other platforms. The basic reason is that Microsoft stuff performs really well and you won't have to worry about a lot of problems for a very long time.

Chances are one or two webservers will handle your page requests for quite some time before you need to start thinking about it. ASP.Net's sessions also work very well with server farms without much work beyond configuration you just need to follow a few rules and it works great.

Assuming you went with SQL Server 2008 then chances are your database is going to perform very well for quite some time. A DBA or consultant can come in when things get tough but any senior level developer who tries to act cool by pretending to be a DBA can keep things moving along until you have cash to pay someone to really make sure things scale well.

Plus no one cares. If your startup is moderately cool getting C# developers won't be tough either. I've met plenty of great C# developers so they're definitely out there.

j_baker9• 15 years ago

To be clear, there are valid reasons to use C#. I just don't think "nobody cares, besides C# developers are cheap and easy to find" is one of them.

(and while I'm leaving a comment anyway, I might as well apologize for the accidental downvote)

japherwocky5• 15 years ago

By what metric does Microsoft stuff perform really well?

You're seriously saying you choose Microsoft for performance and stability? And you have a dozen upvotes?

nostrademons7• 15 years ago

.NET actually isn't that bad as far as performance and stability go. It's about on par with Java. It's much faster than scripting languages, and significantly more stable than Ruby.

Administering a Windows stack can sometimes blow, but the languages and virtual machines themselves are relatively solid.

pestaa2• 15 years ago

Since Windows 7, I'm not surprised to see someone connecting Microsoft with performance and stability.

(I'm pointing out MS had worse days, and is catching up seriously. I also realize an OS for home users might not be the best evidence in the world.)

Todd• 15 years ago

.NET languages are compiled. The compilers build an intermediate representation (IL, similar to bytecode in languages that use a VM) and they're just-in-time compiled when they're first loaded, so they run as native code. As an aside, one advantage is your assemblies automatically compile to 32- or 64-bit based on your platform, so you get "free" access to +4GB of memory if you're deployed to a 64-bit machine.

Java (for example) and C# benchmarks tend to be close because Java is very mature and, even though it runs on a VM, is highly optimized. It compares favorably with C for this reason.

The MS compilers are very good and Mono is catching up. If you run on Linux, you'll probably be slower than Java in many cases. That will change over time.

Stability is a different question. The stability of C#, F#, etc. is not related to Windows and IIS as platforms. You can run C# based web stacks on Linux.

firemanx• 15 years ago

Do you have any proof otherwise? I've developed software on numerous platforms, and the Microsoft stack was incredibly stable, and performed better than any Ruby/PHP/Python stack I've worked with.

I prefer to do most things in Rails these days, but I'm not kidding myself that for raw performance, .NET is great.

adient• 15 years ago

Seems to work well enough for stackoverflow.

math• 15 years ago

I second that. I know quite a number of very high calibre C# developers and in my experience getting good C# developers to work on interesting projects has not been overly difficult.

I'm currently building a site in C# and deploying using mono on Linux. Very impressed with mono so far. My site has not been tested under high load, but nothing is suggesting to me so far that mono is not a viable option, and a solution which solves many of the problems pointed out in the article's comments.

jrockway2• 15 years ago

"I don't know anything about programming, therefore my first choice is best."

Sure, that makes sense.

(It also follows from this logic that cheap programmers are a good thing to have. If you need to do twice as much work, you just hire twice as many programmers! Combined with an IDE, you're sure to succeed!)

tjogin3• 15 years ago

That's my go-to argument when choosing languages.

Whenever someone says to use Java or .NET rather than the relatively obscure Ruby (or Node.js or whatever) because that makes it easier to find programmers, I always ask why they want to staff up on average to below average programmers. (Edit: sure there are good ones, just far more bad ones)

At least if they use the obscure language, you know that the programmer in question has his eyes and ears out there, finding things out on his own, trying things, reading stuff. There are a lot of cubicle programmers who simply don't; that find out about things when things are added to Visual Studio.

Not saying obscure languages are better in and of themselves (well, maybe just a pinch), just that the opposite isn't true. Easy access to droves of average to poor programmers is not a feature.

knieveltech• 15 years ago

You're going to find the full range of talent regardless of which language you're using. Erlang doesn't guarantee godlike competence, and .NET doesn't guarantee mediocrity. I think your biases are showing a little here.

Sandman• 15 years ago

why they want to staff up on average to below average programmers

1. Because they don't want to spend a lot of time looking for developers - it's far easier to find a Java developer than, say, a Ruby developer, simply because there's so many of them. Also, because there is so many of them, in all likelihood they will ask for standard wages whereas a developer with a good knowledge of some lesser known language/technology might ask for a higher pay because he knows his skills are in demand and the employer cannot easily find somebody else with those skills for a lot less money.

2. For certain types of software there is no need to have the best of the best. Average programmers are just fine for working on a standard CRUD application. If you're Google and you're hiring people to work on your search engine, then yes, you want to have the most brilliant minds out there, but if you're a company that just needs somebody to maintain it's CRUD application than you'll do just fine with an average developer, who'll be more than happy to work for standard, average pay.

That being said, it's my opinion that, when hiring developers for work on an enterprise app, it's probably best to hire those that have a good knowledge of some enterprise-proven language like Java or C#, but with an interest in languages such as Scala, Ruby or Python. This way you get the guy that knows his way around an enterprise stack, but that's also not just a drone that considers programming nothing more than a day job, you get somebody who actually likes coding and frequently codes just for the fun of it.

Joakal• 15 years ago

For those who are a solo developer and get strange requests such as "I demand this to be in ASP/PHP/etc." With whatever language you use, program away and modify .htaccess file to display the desired extension of .asp/.php/.etc.

I haven't yet wanted to try this but get tempted.

a5seo2• 15 years ago

The biggest lesson I learned at my last startup is that your dev platform is an HR decision.

After the fact, I realized it would have been smart to at least check Indeed Trends to find out how niche our platform was. If you aren't seeing many jobs asking for CodeIgniter, just to use as an example, don't count on finding a lot of developers. If you have a good company, you're better off competing for talent head-to-head on a rising platform.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=codeigniter%2Ccakephp&...

j_baker9• 15 years ago

It doesn't quite work that way. Strictly speaking, you will find more developers if you choose the technology of the week or some other popular thing. But that doesn't mean that you'll find more good developers. They're difficult to find no matter what technology you're working with.

That said, you're on the right track as far as realizing that technology has an impact on who you hire. I would choose one more because it helps set you apart from other companies, not because it's what everyone else is using.

a5seo2• 15 years ago

Having inadvertently chosen something (almost) no one was using, except us, I mightily regret not doing a sanity check to get the big picture. It made hiring really expensive and slow.

tzs• 15 years ago

I'm a bit suspicious of their trends. It shows Perl significantly ahead of PHP, which is significantly ahead of Python. As a Perl programmer, I wish that were true, but I doubt it.

It also has COBOL ahead of Python up until 2008. I am skeptical of that.

gfodor• 15 years ago

I find this juxtaposition pretty funny:

"I made a list of likely acquirers and then looked at what kind of programming skills they hire for. It was clear they all favor Microsoft. All things being equal it seemed logical to do the same."

and

"At the end of the day things just have to work and customers don’t give a shit what technology you built your site on."

If you're building a startup to "flip" it, isn't your future acquirer just as much a customer as your, er, customers?

humblest_ever• 15 years ago

yeah, what a misleading title.

"nobody cares what language you use." "potential buyers like asp."

andrewtbham• 15 years ago

My personal experience is that the MS stack is tough for a startup because Sql Server can get expensive... especially if you want uptime. The feature to rebuild the indexes (without downtime) and do horizontal partitioning requires the enterprise edition... and it retails at 25k/processor.

If you go with asp.net consider your budget before choosing sql server.

sokoloff2• 15 years ago

Most places can take the few minutes of SQL blocking resulting from an index rebuild in standard edition.

I know we often jump towards 5 9 solutions, because it feels like the "Right Thing(TM)" to do, but you can afford a lot of episodes of few minutes of blocking for what enterprise edition will cost... (we do run enterprise edition on our needed-by-cash-register DBs)

I'm a big fan of MS-SQL, and would encourage people to think about the value of chasing that 4th nine of uptime. It doesn't make sense for most companies, IMO.

Encosia• 15 years ago

You can rebuild indexes in-place in even the free versions of SQL Server.

arethuza7• 15 years ago

I think he means online indexing http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc966402.aspx

arethuza7• 15 years ago

Nothing stopping you using another database server - I've started using CouchDB with an ASP.Net MVC application because I wanted documented oriented storage and it works perfectly well.

MySQL seems to have plenty support, as does Oracle etc.

kevinpet• 15 years ago

I don't think a startup that is not fundamentally technical has much to say about the merits of different technologies. This is a startup, and it's innovative, but it doesn't rely on the technology. Technology is just one piece of the puzzle for this kind of company. The company could succeed even if the technology were junk. Let's say he had a competitor who had a similar business model. They're competing on pricing models, advertising, convenience of shipping methods, turn around, and, yes, convenience and reliability of the website. But the last one is only a deciding factor if there's nothing more important in the other factors.

To summarize: nobody really gives a damn what you build your site in, if you aren't trying to do anything hard or innovative on the technology side.

pestaa2• 15 years ago

Succeeding harder if the technology was junk is one assumption you might agree with.

Furthermore, from your list, anything that's not business is technology. Not every company ships physically, and those who don't just ship their product through the stack.

How fundamentally technical the startup is, is not decided by the owner but by the context. And technology matters there, a lot.

rit• 15 years ago

I noticed that both examples of companies he didn't want to compete with talent for (Tumblr and Etsy) are NY companies, so I wasn't surprised to see his company is in Hoboken (just across the river from Manhattan).

The reality of course is in NY you're always competing for talent --- not just with the hot startups of the moment (Etsy, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc etc etc) but with the banks which are still paying big salaries for developers and solid benefits and bonuses.

The truth here - whether the author thinks the technology or not matters - is that he isn't competing at all for programming talent. He is competing for the kind of people who want to work at a hot startup, and have that mentality, versus a small one man shop. His statement "Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is. " is telling.

Of course, its a completely unqualified unbacked statement.

But understanding the reality of what your talent shortages are caused by is important. I get the feeling that he went with the first technology he could hire people for cheap enough with.

DjDarkman2• 15 years ago

I feel that the author just didn't try any other technologies.

> I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation

I find this hard to believe. Again I think the author knows his way around Microsoft products, and is biased towards it.

> Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is.

I find this statement self-justifying and false. If a product is more scarce than others than it will probably be more expensive, in other words: if there is bigger competition there are lower prices.

The premise is true, no one cares about the server side technology expect maybe programmers who will have to build on that... wait what?

kenjackson2• 15 years ago

> I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation

I find this hard to believe.

Why do you find it hard to believe? ASP.NET is really well documented. Is it absolutely the best documented product in the world, but it is reasonable that someone doing an investigation could reasonably believe that ASP.NET has the best documentation.

japherwocky5• 15 years ago

It's the choice of words, really. does it have good documentation, or thorough documentation?

The author's argument would be twice as compelling if he backed such a strong statement up, or toned it down a bit.

Unmatched? Mmmkay.

DjDarkman2• 15 years ago

I find it hard to believe if the author does not back it up with a lot of research and statistics. If the author would have just said 'it has great documentation' I would have said nothing about it, but when the compares it with others, he should have something to back it up.

MortenK2• 15 years ago

As others have mentioned, using the term "unmatched" might be a stretch. I really wouldn't know the state of documentation for something like, lets say Lisp or Clojure, and probably the author doesn't either. But it's not up for discussion that .NET has a very comprehensive, high quality level of documentation, just take a look at MSDN.

rodh257• 15 years ago

.NET documentation is really good. I can't quantify it as being the best but there is so much training material out there.

Examples: Tons of free video tutorials: http://www.asp.net/web-forms http://www.asp.net/mvc http://www.mvcconf.com/

heaps of books http://www.asp.net/community/books http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...

then of course there is the Microsoft Developer Network http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/ff380144

with training courses/hands on labs http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/VS2010TrainingCourse_AspNetM...

plenty of people who can answer your questions on SO (C# and ASP.NET are a couple of the most popular tags) http://stackoverflow.com/tags

and msdn forums http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-au/categories

if you want to pay for training, there's plenty of that too, as .NET is used lots in the enterprise there is training centres and other paid services a plenty: http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/ http://learning.microsoft.com/manager/catalog.aspx?brand=msd...

additionally, they have a certification program with all the training materials and training courses for that http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-v...

I realize that there is probably great documentation for other open source frameworks as well, but I can see that it's likely Microsoft will always have great documentation on the very latest versions of their tools as they pay people to make the documentation, whereas OSS frameworks are more likely to rely on people to write boring documentation in their spare time.

dennisgorelik2• 15 years ago

While Scott Guthrie is in charge of ASP.NET team -- ASP.NET would be a good choice (even though Microsoft overall is stagnating).

superlogical• 15 years ago

While Microsoft seems to be stagnating at the same time Mono and Linux is gaining huge popularity. Checkout these links

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-14.html

IOS - IPod, IPad, IPhone: MonoTouch http://monotouch.net - Windows: Mono http://mono-project.com/Main_Page - Mac: MonoMac http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMac - Android: MonoDroid http://monodroid.net/ - Blackberry: MonoWebOs to be announced

mkramlich3• 15 years ago

Your endusers may not care. Not directly. But they'll care when your site has problems or is slow. This part, in turn, is heavily influenced by the quality of engineers you have behind the scenes, and the choices they make. The nature/quality of your engineers will be influenced by what kinds of technical choices are in place at the time you start trying to hire them on. As a general rule, for example, a LAMP stack is going to attract a different mix than a Microsoft stack would. Lisp will attract different than PHP. Therefore, tech does matter. Does it matter as much as making a product people want and are willing to pay for? Probably not as much. But if/when the time comes and you want your site to scale, or have lower problem rate, then your engineers and your tech are going to matter.

ThomPete• 15 years ago

Pardon my ignorance. But isn't your site slow if you develop it wrong, not because you use the "wrong" language?

I thought there where good developers in all programming languages and really bad ones too?

For how many people is overnight success really the case? Most companies grow slowly over the years making scaling issues much less volatile.

mkramlich3• 15 years ago

The absolute number one bottleneck in software-based startups right now is the availability, interest and affordability of good software engineers. The number and quality of engineers you're going to be able to attract will be heavily influenced by your tech choices upfront. There are some engineers who are so desperate they'll say yes to anything. There are others who have lots of choices and get to pick which to say yes too. In general, you'd rather have the second kind. So yes, tech does matter. The exact shade of the color blue you use in some image somewhere? Probably not matter too much. Your tech mix? Hell yes.

japherwocky5• 15 years ago

You know why you don't have a good reason for choosing a language? Because you are a total programming newbie who hasn't actually tried to use other languages for anything!

If you use a better language, you will add features faster and spend less time fixing bugs, and you will be making the world a better place.

Your logic is naive at best, and awful at worst: "It just is." isn't an argument anyone should take seriously.

timclark• 15 years ago

Nobody gives a damn but then he provides us with 4 debatable reasons why he personally chose a technology. Sure looks like he gives a damn to me.

pacifika• 15 years ago

Dan has all the qualities of a Microsoft employee - staff photo on blog (check), stripey shirt (check), called Dan (check), enterprisey design (check), wall of text (check).

middlegeek• 15 years ago

Wow, great insight for a fellow non-CS person who wants to build their own site anyway. I just subscribed to your blog. Thanks!

JSig2• 15 years ago

My beef with .NET is that the platform and community does not feel very organic like it is with others. Making a huge generalization, I would say that the .NET community waits around for the Mother ship to produce something that it can use. This was one impetus for the ALT.NET movement.

A great example of community in action is the castle project at http://www.castleproject.org/

In the year 2010, .NET finally has a package management system. Guess who created it?

johns5• 15 years ago

It was first created by non-MS guys, and there are others out there by community members. MS decided to form an officially-endorsed open source project for NuGet. Pretty good model actually. It's a collaboration of MS employees and community members and they take outside contributions. Not sure what's wrong with that. It needed to be in VS to take off.

The organic community is there, it's just not the dominant one but it has a significant presence.

JSig2• 15 years ago

>> It's a collaboration of MS employees and community members and they take outside contributions. Not sure what's wrong with that.

I agree, nothing wrong with that. I think a lot of the stuff that MS has been doing under Scott Guthrie in recent years has been very good in regards to fostering a better community.

>> It needed to be in VS to take off.

Do you think NuGet would be successful if MS had not officially endorsed the project?

Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

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