[BrentOzar]

In the past, it's been about budgets: Microsoft has an aura of money about it. The OS cost money, the good developer tools cost money, the database cost (a lot of) money. Startups are by definition cash-strapped.

Some of that is changing - the developer tooling is getting free/cheap - but the rest of the stack (OS, hosting, database) still isn't free. (I know, the MS folks are going to say SQL Server Express Edition is free, but you rarely run a startup on that.)

[TobbenTM]

But it is free though! With .Net Core being Cross platform, I've actually yet to run it on anything else than Linux in production environments! Hosting is the same as any other technology, you just need a host to either run containers or the .Net artifacts directly. Lastly, I think it's unfair to throw SQL server into this comparison, as MySQL and PostgreSQL are perfectly supported with entity framework.

[pryelluw]

It has only been open source for a relative short amount of time when compared with other technologies like Node, RoR, etc.

.Net has historically cost money while providing somewhat similar features as open source competitors. Its why MS was forced into open sourcing it. They could not compete anymore.

[DarkStar851]

.NET itself has always been "free" (as in beer), it's just VS they made people pay for. They've had a community edition since VS2012 at least, possibly earlier but that's as far back as my brain goes.

The Community edition is pretty full-featured, it's only missing some TFS integration stuff, some test suite stuff and advanced profiling. I'd compare it to IntelliJ's free/pro model.

[dogma1138]

Before CE it was Visual Studio Express which was also pretty much the same.

[pseudalopex]

They also made people pay for Windows.

[jetti]

Community Edition has restrictions on use for organizations.

[mattmanser]

Last time I tried MySQL with the EF the performance was terrible, the EF was outputting a load of nested tables that were fine with SQL Server, but absolutely abysmal performance with MySQL. This was a while ago.

Have you used this personally, and do you have any scale? As there's 'supported' and there's good.

[iamnothere]

EF is overkill for most things, like most heavyweight ORMs. Good for "line of business" apps, probably not great for most other applications. Dapper is much more performant.

[potta_coffee]

Just because Microsoft has made some free stuff recently doesn't mean I'm going to switch stacks all of a sudden, when there are comparable frameworks I already know.