During one of the podcasts I believe Jeff stated that he was able to get free copies of the most expensive version of Visual Studio from a friend at MS.
Jeff Attwood and co that built it are used to .Net/MS/Visual Studio development, so for them the cost was probably small compared to the cost of switching stacks + tools.
It's probably not the stack I would pick and my initial reaction is always to gasp when I see startups built on Microsoft, but...
- ASP.NET can scale, if you do it right. Aside from Microsoft.com/MSN, which don't really count, MySpace uses it (though they upgraded from ColdFusion, which wasn't much better) and Plenty of Fish, the web's largest dating site, uses it too:
http://www.plentyoffish.com/about_team.aspx
These are probably all larger than the most successful Rails sites.
- ASP.NET MVC isn't a horrible programming model. Forget the abomination that's normal ASP.NET with its funky events. If you've used another MVC framework like Rails or Cake, you'll feel right at home.
- It's all about getting v1 out and releasing early and often. If your team grew up on Microsoft, are you really going to make them all learn a new framework? If you do it right and prove out your idea, you can always rewrite later.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 53.8 ms ] threadWell, they other options are open. So it might make sense. :P
Up to you whether or not you're getting enough of a productivity gain to justify it.
Even if you decide to spring for the full developer licenses you are looking at less than a week of a developers salary for some really good tools.
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/editions/express/default.mspx
Talk to one of their technology evangelists, they love seeing cutting edge companies building their business on MS.
Anand Iyer, http://blogs.msdn.com/aniyer/, can point you in the right direction.
Also, you may want to peek at the HN HTML source.
With what was Stack Overflow built?
:~)
- ASP.NET can scale, if you do it right. Aside from Microsoft.com/MSN, which don't really count, MySpace uses it (though they upgraded from ColdFusion, which wasn't much better) and Plenty of Fish, the web's largest dating site, uses it too: http://www.plentyoffish.com/about_team.aspx These are probably all larger than the most successful Rails sites.
- ASP.NET MVC isn't a horrible programming model. Forget the abomination that's normal ASP.NET with its funky events. If you've used another MVC framework like Rails or Cake, you'll feel right at home.
- Microsoft's startup program gives startups the early software for super cheap: http://microsoftstartupzone.com/
- It's all about getting v1 out and releasing early and often. If your team grew up on Microsoft, are you really going to make them all learn a new framework? If you do it right and prove out your idea, you can always rewrite later.
What would you recommend that career Microsoft developers use for their startups?