[stirno]

I think you've tied your entire response to SQL Server rather than the .NET stack so I'll do the same from an ASP.NET aspect..

ASP.NET is moving at an incredible pace, the new vNext bits are planned to be officially cross-platform and you can support any number of database backends from a .NET codebase.

I also challenge your assertion that better people seem to use other platforms. You can find people marketing themselves as one thing but preferring another in any stack. This is not indicative of anything more than someone needing a job and meeting the requirements of a posting.

Licensing costs can vary. Between BizSpark, DreamSpark and other programs you can get dev tools out of the way quickly. They also provide Windows licensing for the period you're in the program.

The areas where you can get in real trouble as a startup with Microsoft are the add-on product stacks like SQL Server and BizTalk (shudder). I would avoid these in a new product but do not fear building with the .NET platform.

[allegory]

SQL server is pretty much inevitable otherwise you have to deploy on Linux (don't get me started on pgsql/mysql on windows). Then you have two disparate skill sets to maintain at great cost. Startups need to stick to heterogeneous platforms to keep costs low.

Asp.net v.next is currently a bag of promises. I wouldn't put a product near it for a long time. I back this assertion up with the promises of Velocity, EF4, SilverLight and WF4, all of which were disasterous piles of immature crud that disappeared after a bit leading to massive rewrites. Even MVC has a patchy history and numerous problems in it now (crazy API churn, attribute lifecycle/scope, memory ceiling, routing performance etc are all ones that I've spent days on...). Generally the entire web and enterprise teams have knocked out low quality rubbish for years.

People who advertise themselves as .net developers (as I do) know how to get paid a lot, not necessarily deliver the best solution for the money. There are those of us however who have fingers in many pots who know how greener the grass is and how organisations would benefit from a change and are taken on to fix the tech stack.

Agree with your assertion about BizTalk but mno further.

[tinco]

Why is deploying psql on linux a problem when running an ASP.Net service? Are you avoiding to manage different operating systems?

[allegory]

It isn't and we do that but its not desirable for a startup to do that. Someone with tangible expertise on both platforms is hard to find and expensive (me :-)

[jf22]

>crazy API churn

Can you go into this a bit? I just upgraded a MVC2 site to MVC5 and didn't have to change much.

I know the DI bits changed from MVC2-3 but all the existing extensibility methods worked.

[locusm]

Care to comment on your .Net/pgsql experience?

[jwynia]

I just finished a project with ASP.NET MVC over PostgreSQL via NHibernate. Worked great. Just out of curiosity, I actually even set it up so I could change it over to SQL Server with a config change. While it was a small and relatively uncomplicated data model (20 tables or so), it encouraged me to consider doing this combo more often. This project is hosted on AWS with AWS RDS for pgsql. Made it easy to use the basic Windows servers on AWS and not have to manage the data servers for pgsql.

[locusm]

Thanks for replying, been meaning to use ServiceStack/pgsql on a side project...

[allegory]

Unfortunately we don't mix the two. Npgsql is available though and I understand there is an NHibernate dialect available.