

Ask HN: Bay Area .Net Devs - Stigma on .Net - dannyr

I had a conversation with a technical recruiter today. She told me that there is a stigma on .Net among startups. Maybe it's just Microsoft in general.<p>I hear this a lot too when I get to meet other hackers. Somebody actually told me that there is no reason for .Net to exist.<p>My experience is here is that .Net jobs are hard to find in the Bay area compared to other cities. I'm lucky to have one right now.<p>Because of this, I have been coding in Python and Django for the past 6 months to at least broaden my options when I have to go back to the job market again.<p>Do other .Net developers have the same experience like I do?
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makecheck
I think you're better off with the portable skill set. It introduces you to
the non-Microsoft way of doing things, which in my experience is usually for
the best.

What are some examples of unique/better/amazing things that .NET does? And
what could make it worth requiring Windows to use?

If it's just yet-another-way-to-do-X, and Windows-only "for no good reason"
(and Mono doesn't count), then you have your answer. Money is tight,
especially in a startup; if I am to invest in Windows, it had better be to
enable some _outstanding_ technology that will genuinely give me a leg up on
the competition.

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ScottWhigham
Wait - you answered a different question, didn't you? The question you
answered seems to be, "Should I just learn .NET or should I learn more stuff
along with it?"

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peripatetic
I work for a startup in sv. successful. we are all linux, python, ruby. we are
building our infrastructure from the bottom up, (no previous decisions we are
locked into). The idea of doing _anything_ with microsoft is just completely
alien... its like another world that is just not relevant to us. could you
imagine if we were discussing a new service and one of our engineers said
"lets buy a win server 2008 license and an IIS license and check that out" ha.
lol. "and if we have any questions we'll just pull up some stuff on the
microsoft knowledge center or msdevnet to figure out how to use it." LOL!!

(feeling is similar towards java, but java people are seen as more redeemable.
but if you worked on java at HP, you are pretty much lost to us.)

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felixmar
I don't live in the Bay area, but i think Microsoft's problem concerning
startups is that they haven't created many exciting platforms for some time.
Take for example the activity around iPhone and Android. Apple creates more
roadblocks for developers than Microsoft ever did and Java is not the most
interesting language to program in. But both platforms are attractive so
developers keep developing new applications for them.

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sarvesh
.Net isn't the most terrible framework but it comes with a lot of baggage and
some technical problems that would deter startups from using it.

On the web development side ASP.Net is really hard compared to other
frameworks out there. Until ASP.Net MVC, there wasn't a quick and easy method
to implement URL rewriting for example. On the ORM side they seem to be
changing their mind every year they ditched Linq to SQL in favor Entity
Framework which really doesn't work as seamlessly as they make it out to be.
Add to this the fact the startup has to buy licenses for the server, the costs
add up as you scale up. I know there is Mono but there it isn't easy to port
everything to it, the implementation isn't exactly complete.

.Net has its place for example if you are writing a Windows only desktop
application .Net is by far the easiest framework MS had to support it. I
believe Xobini uses .Net. Again writing cross platform desktop applications
doesn't look as appealing to me. Silverlight 3 is almost here but it still yet
to get font rendering and printing right.

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ScottWhigham
What "baggage" does .NET come with specifically other than being from MSFT?
And I don't know what "technical problems" .NET, the framework, has. That
opening sentence is just so vague and full of very strong statements yet there
is absolutely no defense of those statements. I'm no MS apologist but the
guy's asking for reasons why there's a .NET stigma and the first sentence in
your response is just hyperbole IMO.

