http://www.timacheson.com

Here I’m running ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework on a standard shared hosting environment, it’s cheap and performance is unbeatable — with or without the awesome power of OutputCache at page-level.

And take a look at Balsamiq (http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups), he (the balsamiq creator) has a great application and his blog is pretty cool.

The option in this case for a company is hire a dev or have the existing dev’s learn a new language. It would have been interesting to see what your inhouse dev’s would have made from switching from one language to another for a new project. Would you have done the same or just stick with what you are used to using?

Fuel had considered .NET MVC for a recent project and decided against it.  I agree with your point about being unbiased toward technology; our discussion was whether we wanted to sacrifice focus and whether the incremental gain would be worth the benefit.  So aside from the case study in progress, (Which of course has stand-alone value) our team is definitely interested in both an objective look at .NET MVC in action and if whether the education, time investment & cost of implementing vs. something like Rails, will be worth the benefit.

Thank you, Ryan! You just made me realise Carsonified is just a really elaborate practical joke. Had a big laugh at that one. Feel free to send me an email with the number for your dealer, because I want some of that funny crack you’re smoking.

I am disappointed if this is solely inspired by the vendor’s funding. A wise developer has an obligation to understand the entire choice of tools regardless of how cash flows. I like to read blogs such as this on the assumption they’re more or less independent. (See also the Vodafone-backed widget project…)

Anyway +1 to the comment above regarding Truvay. The progress and/or suspension of a troubled app’s life are just as interesting as new ones’ glamourous early days.

I hear what you are saying and would be interested to hear what particular elements of licensing have caused you pain. Will ping you an email offline.

We are trying to make things easier for developers to pick up our stuff, develop with it and be appropriately licensed through some of our technologies like Azure and programs like Bizspark:

Bizspark http://www.bizspark.com – this is our programme for startups and gives easy access to all our software with the appropriate licenses, etc. There are loads of great examples of how startups have used Bizspark to license and use MS technologies in their products/services

Azure http://www.azure.com – this is will definitely make application development in the cloud easier and provide the clarity/flexibility to grow as your business grows. It isn’t the solution for everybody but definitely has loads of potential

Hosting – We work closely with hosting partners to help them figure out the licensing issue so that you as the end customer shouldn’t have to. We continue to invest in this area to make it easier for customers to use our stack – e.g. creation of a Web Server version (or ‘SKU’) of Windows Server specifically to help hosters and customers simplify and specialize in the web hosting space

Microsoft are listening to the open source movement, more and more projects coming out of Microsoft are published under the MSPL http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html. ASP.NET MVC is just one of those.

Microsoft are also listening to startups http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/startup-toolkit and are trying to resolve some of the problems you’ve highlighted.

Of course a different approach would be to look at Mono http://www.mono-project.com, they’ve actually got ASP.NET MVC running on the Mono platform http://mjhutchinson.com/journal/2009/04/02/aspnet_mvc_monodevelop_addin_preview.

http://www.timacheson.com/Blog/2009/jun/creating_a_blog_from_scratch_with_asp.net_mvc#comment39

However you can abstract away nearly all of the complexities of your licensing headache depending on how your business operates. Small to medium sized firms can lease thier hardware and software- think hosting- if i lease dedicated servers they come with leased software installed- Sql server/Windows server etc. This is not expensive- it costs me $25 per month for a full license for Sql2008 Web hosted on a dedicated server (at $250 per month for the server). Great value for me as a MS web developer my clients and my business. If they release a new product i will migrate, just as I migrate to new better, faster shinier hardware every 12-18 months. The cost to change is minimal.

If you have to develop and support LOB apps in the workplace and host servers yourself- well that gets more expensive. We have just purchased a new Sql2008 license at work for £20k- but this is a core underlying component to the business that supports hundreds of employees all using a custom built LOB application.

As most of the readers of this blog are really talking about web based enterprises/business’ the licensing costs are negligable. Not free, not as cheap as a LAMP stack, but not prohibitive. There ae many ways that a development shop can get dev and testing licenses for next to nothing (microsoft Action Pack £200 per year enough licences to sink a boat).

RE your start up comment- you could use the biz spark programme which gives you full development tools, production server licences and everything you need
for no cost (IIRC). http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Faqs.aspx

Developing MS apps/sites is not free, but its not necessarily that expensive (though it can be depending on you line of business).

Ben

I think the issue of tooling is very important, as you said. I’ve been particularly impressed with Visual Studio. After seeing it, it’s kind of shocking to go back to TextMate.

Additionally, tooling is an important issue that is often neglected when discussing development (I’m personally yet to use an IDE that I would rate higher than VS). Which is odd considering the seemingly accepted costs for a designer if they use the classic Adobe CS apps. I doubt many designers use only the GIMP and so I don’t think the cost of VS is a barrier to entry (anymore than Photoshop for designers – and MS provide VS Express for free). Yes its costly and yes you will pay a bit more for a windows server than a linux server (although, on one of the budget hostings, I use its less than a dollar difference a month between windows and linux). You could develop using VS Express and deploy with any database of your choice.

Of course you don’t have to use MS at all, but the argument that you are locked in and have difficult licensing issues seems to be often more of a knee jerk response than a thought out issue.

Good luck with MVC, we’ll be following your progress with interest. We’ve been using it both internally and personally at Headscape and so far find it particularly powerful and exciting.

The main issue I have with .NET is how evolution of the framework breaks setimes crucial functionality with little or no warning. And there are some nasty gotchas when you try to improve performance.

Not major concerns however and still an interesting project. I look forward to seeing the final result!

Let me take this up with Mark and Mark over at MS and see what they have to say. I wonder if it’s going to get simpler with Azure?

One of the big drawbacks developing on a Microsoft stack for me wasn’t the technology, but the licensing. The problem isn’t as simple as cost alone. Free is always preferable on paper, but when it really comes down to it those costs aren’t usually so high that they become insurmountable. I think the problem is twofold.

Firstly, the licenses are extremely complex. There’s no single fee that you can just pay and then get down to work. You need to license each server and then license those servers to talk to each other and then license other people to talk to those servers, and it’s all just a headache.

The second problem is a symptom of the first. Because licenses are charged out at different rates, there is necessarily the need for artificial limitation on what any particular license allows you to do. In order to charge more of some features, the vendor has to turn those features off in the cheaper versions. This results in having to make a choice at the outset as to what you’re going to use, and then pretty much denies you the flexibility to change further down the line.

This is pretty much counter to the way a start-up operates. You need to be able to quickly change your plans and be 100% flexible as you go. Commercial licensing can make this a real pain to achieve.

I completely agree about choosing the best tool for the job. I also stand by the commercial software model for many types of software (I develop commercial software myself). When it comes down to the fundamentals of the platform your business is built on, I think it’s important to be able to choose the best tool, and not have to compromise on a technical choice because of license restrictions placed on you by an external software vendor.