[donw]

I think that this article[1] is still relevant. In short, if you go Microsoft, you know you're locking yourself into an expensive ecosystem, one with no viable open-source escape hatch.

Moreover, you need to find developers that want to work on the .NET platform. Most of those people work in banking or in large organizations, and are unlikely to want to jump ship to a startup.

[1] https://blog.jonathanoliver.com/why-i-left-dot-net/

[csmattryder]

An article from 2014? You should know things have changed since then, with .NET Core and the open-sourcing of most .NET tech (Roselyn, OmniSharp and the .NET Core tooling).

No more lock-in with Windows Server, no more SQL Server. Bring your favourite Linux distro and open-source RDBMS.

I left .NET for Ruby in 2013, and in the last two years, I've come sprinting back to .NET Core. Microsoft is definitely hot again.

[angio]

I use .NET Core with F# on Linux because you get a reasonably good functional language with access to a vast ecosystem and first class support on all clouds. Thanks to Fable and Feliz, you can use it to write React applications as well.

[donw]

Microsoft Research certainly does a lot of interesting stuff, but I think the bigger point is inertia -- Microsoft doesn't have any in the startup space.

Ruby, and to a large extent Python, started from zero, and gained a ton of traction during the whole Web 2.0 rumble.

Microsoft is starting from a negative perception amongst a lot of engineers, and unless they can provide some sort of killer reason to use .NET technologies -- one that doesn't lock you into their ecosystem -- then I don't see them unseating the established players.

Swift and its descendants will be around as long as Apple is, same story for Java and Android. Ruby/Python/Node will continue on in the Web space, with Go/Rust/C++ duking it out for backend services.

This game changes should Microsoft blow a new market open, though, like Apple and Google did with smartphones.

[csmattryder]

> Microsoft is starting from a negative perception amongst a lot of engineers, and unless they can provide some sort of killer reason to use .NET technologies

Yeah, as stated above, I used to build on .NET back when WinForms was king. ASP MVC wasn't fun to write, Rails was a blast.

If you haven't got C# experience, I can understand the apprehension.

History repeats itself and almost definitely MS will get it wrong again for .NET, but right now, the money is good and the tech is interesting if you're into web tech and C#.

[nayaketo]

> Winforms was king. MVC wasn't fun to write with

Having worked with both, I have exactly opposite feelings about the two platforms. Except speed of development, I have absolutely nothing positive to say about Webforms.

[csmattryder]

Ah no! While a standard thing to do for the web, WinForms let you do the strangest stuff like mimicking OS X for a piece of Windows-only software.

My excuse is I was seventeen at the time... Back then, I was afraid of both hard graft and human interface guidelines.

https://mattryder.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/capture.png

[donw]

> History repeats itself

I would go with "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes". :)

> definitely MS will get it wrong again

Oh, definitely. And I agree -- Microsoft is doing some interesting stuff right now. VSCode has made a big splash, they bought GitHub, etc.

[Cthulhu_]

But I'm sure you can recognise that .NET has a lot of err, negative inertia; it is becoming a more viable solution, but it's not there yet.

I did end up in a project a little while ago where they picked .net and azure as their technology of choice. Not sure what factors were in play there.