As a fan of Heroku and Git I love seeing this and other efforts to duplicate their ease of deployment and process for .NET developers.
However, I question whether there is enough of a market for these services to be truly successful. There are plenty of .NET developers using Git - but for the most part many of them are just now getting to Subversion - or even worse going with TFS (Microsoft's mess of a SCM). MS developers are also traditionally inside medium to large companies - the majority of which want their applications hosted in their own data centers. MS might be able to convince them to use Azure - but a small startup is going to have one helluva time convincing them to host their LOB app with them.
Exactly. The .NET "community" is home to mostly enterprise devs who only ever code to pay the bills. Any developer that is hip to Herkou, and loves Git and automated testing and deployment, is not going to be starting a new .NET app. They'll start an app in Ruby, Python, Clojure, Haskell or Smalltalk (or something).
I'm only speaking from experience here. It's just not a community of tinkerers that's on the cutting edge. I can't think of a single exciting .NET open source project. All of the good stuff that I know of in .NET is commercial: Stack Overflow, Unity, umm... anything else? It's a community that waits for the next thing to be handed down from Microsoft.
Show me Heroku for Seaside... now we're talking!
P.S. If anybody wants to show me some vibrant cutting-edge open source projects built on .NET instead of just downvoting, I'd love to know. Thanks!
The .Net community has a weird shade to it, absolutely.
That said, you're clearly speaking to your perception of what you see on tech-help boards -- and confusing that with the whole of the .Net ecosystem. .Net has vastly larger segment of 9-5/offshore/crap/whatever programmers than most other programming communities (aside from Java, being a similarly targeted platform). That doesn't mean that there aren't a bunch of DVCS-using, TDDing, PairProgramming, SE hipsters out there (or whatever you think is so awesome).
There's Mono (which kicks ass), NHibernate (which kicks ass), a plethora of cool projects on Github, C# is a killer language (compared to similarly rooted, C-like, imperative languages at least), F# has recently been promoted to a first class language on the platform, LINQ is unmatched in similar languages/platforms, .Net is pretty rock solid, and high performing. (edit: Oh, also, MVC, F# + MVC, Lightweight HTTP servers ala Sinatra)
Plus, the right tool for the right job. Let's not get all 'anyone who knows what's up would be using Ruby', etc.
The only really interesting part of .net to me is the F# language, which is ocaml for .net with sugary monad support. The language itself was recently open sourced, there's a VS vim plugin written in the language, and there's at least some game development going on in the language. F# is my language this year and I'm using it as an excuse to learn the environment. I've always been more impressed with .net and its attendant technologies than I have been with the JVM.
OSS on .net is weird in that commercial pressures and Microsoft's anchoring of the system warp it a bit. Things are located in weird places (codeplex) and discussions happen in weird places. The community is also fairly cut off from the *nix oriented OSS community. I run across stuff randomly that I'm surprised is .net and open source but it's intermittent since I'm mostly in the normal OSS ecosystem and am not particularly well connected to the .net world.
It depends on what your definition of "truly successful" is. I recently started working on a .NET app, but I was thinking about switching to Java when I heard about Amazon's Beanstalk offering. If these guys can come close to replicating that for .NET, I'll take a good look at them.
At the end of the day, though, they have an idea, and have convinced investors that there is enough of a market for this type of service, so good luck to them!
If there were a market for better Windows VPSs, wouldn't that already exist? I think there's a lot of room for players in this market and something tells me you agree.
There is a market for Windows VPSs - we already know that. We are just building a better mouse trap with Epic Win (which is what I think you are referencing).
We definitely thought about going the AppHarbor route - and I can't lie that we might not go there at some point - I just think the market opportunity there is much less in the .NET space then in the Ruby space. (which is why we are focusing on VPSs right now)
A friend of mine is the owner of a hosting-company and the last few years he has seen a rise in demand for good Windows-based hosting-solutions.
As a consequence of this, he has reworked his provisioning systems both for shared hosts and VPSes to work smoothly with both Linux and Windows to the point that the only difference you will notice is the price-tag.
Everything works out of the box. The platform you want, capacity you want, extras, applications etc. And this with no extra manual work for the company.
The provisioning system is a massive enterprisey setup with at least 10 servers. I doubt he would have put in all this effort if it weren't for an actual demand in the market.
That said (and despite getting free hosting as a "beta-tester" and Windows consultant), I'm going to give AppHarbor a try.
Isn't Mercurial pretty popular with .NET developers these days, more so than Git (because of the - accurate or not I don't know - pervasive FUD about Git on Windows)? Our company uses it and so do several others I know. It's also the only DVCS supported by Microsoft's online code repository service. Surprised to see it not yet mentioned here among several source control posts.
I think it's equally popular and we're working on supporting Mercurial as soon as possible. A lot of our users have already expressed that they want it (http://appharbor.com/feedback) - and we're in the business of making something people want
Comments
As a fan of Heroku and Git I love seeing this and other efforts to duplicate their ease of deployment and process for .NET developers.
However, I question whether there is enough of a market for these services to be truly successful. There are plenty of .NET developers using Git - but for the most part many of them are just now getting to Subversion - or even worse going with TFS (Microsoft's mess of a SCM). MS developers are also traditionally inside medium to large companies - the majority of which want their applications hosted in their own data centers. MS might be able to convince them to use Azure - but a small startup is going to have one helluva time convincing them to host their LOB app with them.
Exactly. The .NET "community" is home to mostly enterprise devs who only ever code to pay the bills. Any developer that is hip to Herkou, and loves Git and automated testing and deployment, is not going to be starting a new .NET app. They'll start an app in Ruby, Python, Clojure, Haskell or Smalltalk (or something).
I'm only speaking from experience here. It's just not a community of tinkerers that's on the cutting edge. I can't think of a single exciting .NET open source project. All of the good stuff that I know of in .NET is commercial: Stack Overflow, Unity, umm... anything else? It's a community that waits for the next thing to be handed down from Microsoft.
Show me Heroku for Seaside... now we're talking!
P.S. If anybody wants to show me some vibrant cutting-edge open source projects built on .NET instead of just downvoting, I'd love to know. Thanks!
I very frequently start new .NET apps, and I by no means "only ever code to pay the bills" (in fact, I don't work as a programmer at all anymore). Here's a list of a few interesting .NET projects: http://easyhook.codeplex.com/ http://ccimetadata.codeplex.com/ http://www.mono-project.com/Cecil http://daeken.com/renraku-future-os http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/nethooker https://github.com/daeken/Dotpack (The latter three are mine, so I'm a bit biased there)
The .NET community may not have the number of hobbyist developers that Ruby, Python, et al have, but we do exist.
The .Net community has a weird shade to it, absolutely.
That said, you're clearly speaking to your perception of what you see on tech-help boards -- and confusing that with the whole of the .Net ecosystem. .Net has vastly larger segment of 9-5/offshore/crap/whatever programmers than most other programming communities (aside from Java, being a similarly targeted platform). That doesn't mean that there aren't a bunch of DVCS-using, TDDing, PairProgramming, SE hipsters out there (or whatever you think is so awesome).
There's Mono (which kicks ass), NHibernate (which kicks ass), a plethora of cool projects on Github, C# is a killer language (compared to similarly rooted, C-like, imperative languages at least), F# has recently been promoted to a first class language on the platform, LINQ is unmatched in similar languages/platforms, .Net is pretty rock solid, and high performing. (edit: Oh, also, MVC, F# + MVC, Lightweight HTTP servers ala Sinatra)
Plus, the right tool for the right job. Let's not get all 'anyone who knows what's up would be using Ruby', etc.
The only really interesting part of .net to me is the F# language, which is ocaml for .net with sugary monad support. The language itself was recently open sourced, there's a VS vim plugin written in the language, and there's at least some game development going on in the language. F# is my language this year and I'm using it as an excuse to learn the environment. I've always been more impressed with .net and its attendant technologies than I have been with the JVM.
OSS on .net is weird in that commercial pressures and Microsoft's anchoring of the system warp it a bit. Things are located in weird places (codeplex) and discussions happen in weird places. The community is also fairly cut off from the *nix oriented OSS community. I run across stuff randomly that I'm surprised is .net and open source but it's intermittent since I'm mostly in the normal OSS ecosystem and am not particularly well connected to the .net world.
"Show me Heroku for Seaside... now we're talking!"
I want to see that too.
It depends on what your definition of "truly successful" is. I recently started working on a .NET app, but I was thinking about switching to Java when I heard about Amazon's Beanstalk offering. If these guys can come close to replicating that for .NET, I'll take a good look at them.
At the end of the day, though, they have an idea, and have convinced investors that there is enough of a market for this type of service, so good luck to them!
They have me excited anyway.
If there were a market for better Windows VPSs, wouldn't that already exist? I think there's a lot of room for players in this market and something tells me you agree.
There is a market for Windows VPSs - we already know that. We are just building a better mouse trap with Epic Win (which is what I think you are referencing).
We definitely thought about going the AppHarbor route - and I can't lie that we might not go there at some point - I just think the market opportunity there is much less in the .NET space then in the Ruby space. (which is why we are focusing on VPSs right now)
A friend of mine is the owner of a hosting-company and the last few years he has seen a rise in demand for good Windows-based hosting-solutions.
As a consequence of this, he has reworked his provisioning systems both for shared hosts and VPSes to work smoothly with both Linux and Windows to the point that the only difference you will notice is the price-tag.
Everything works out of the box. The platform you want, capacity you want, extras, applications etc. And this with no extra manual work for the company.
The provisioning system is a massive enterprisey setup with at least 10 servers. I doubt he would have put in all this effort if it weren't for an actual demand in the market.
That said (and despite getting free hosting as a "beta-tester" and Windows consultant), I'm going to give AppHarbor a try.
Isn't Mercurial pretty popular with .NET developers these days, more so than Git (because of the - accurate or not I don't know - pervasive FUD about Git on Windows)? Our company uses it and so do several others I know. It's also the only DVCS supported by Microsoft's online code repository service. Surprised to see it not yet mentioned here among several source control posts.
I think it's equally popular and we're working on supporting Mercurial as soon as possible. A lot of our users have already expressed that they want it (http://appharbor.com/feedback) - and we're in the business of making something people want
We use Git with Cygwin for .NET projects. Sometimes it is a real pain. Mostly it just works, though.