Skip to content

Comment on Ask HN: Why is .NET never talked about as an option for solo/small team dev?

Comments

It depends on your demographic.

Now if you're talking about tech startups/firms, then you'd more likely be part of the Linux/open-source and AWS subculture. Your tech choices are going to cluster around that.

But if you're in the non-tech enterprise world, you're in the Windows and Azure subculture. .NET is very prevalent. There are many solo and small teams that contract for non-tech companies that, let's face it are mostly Microsoft shops, that develop in .NET. Microsoft and Azure own almost a huge proportion of the non-tech (think retail, industrial, etc.) enterprise world.

I used to develop in .NET Core and ASP.NET core and found the tooling to be surprisingly good. The IDE (Visual Studio -- the full one, not VS Code) does a lot of work for you. It was easy to spin up a CRUD app -- just some point-and-clicks and modifying some boilerplate code.

However, if you were a web developer who likes to write code in VS Code and likes to work from the ground up, I can see why the above might not be your style.

Also Microsoft software -- despite being very open-source these days -- is still very much backed by a commercial entity, and most people don't have the mental bandwidth to parse out what's commercial and what's not. Take SQL Server for instance. There's a free limited version, but licensing the full version if big bucks. Whereas in the open-source world, Postgres and MySQL are free, as in really free. (the only free Microsoft product I use is VS Code -- and it is excellent)

Postgres and MySQL are free

Mariadb != MySQL... Same API, not the same product.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.