I am going to start hunkering down and building a web standards application on the .Net application. I’ve been pretty technology agnostic over the past few years choosing ColdFusion on Windows against Oracle 8i/9i on HPUX, J2EE with Hibernate and Spring on Redhat with Postgres, Rails with FastCGI then Mongrel against MySQL and Oracle, and most recently Python (Django) and PHP (from WordPress and Textpattern to some custom development using CodeIgniter and CakePHP). But it’s time to build a set of applications using default .Net stack. I haven’t really done a tonne of Windows development since Visual Basic versions 3 through 6 and Delphi.
My MacBook Pro has Vista under BootCamp installed with Visual Web Developer Express and SQL Server 2005 Express. I’m using the Express editions. I want to walk through the process of how I would evaluate the technologies and the development experience. So far, wow, Visual Studio is awesome! I love Textmate but I am really digging the environment.
I’m still trying to figure things out, it’s different but there are a lot of things to like.
I’m finding a lot of folks building very interesting things like Xobni. I’ve listened to Rick Segal wax poetic about why startups don’t use the Microsoft platform. There some perceptions which I may have held at some point. There is a huge market, “Microsoft has sold 85 million licenses to the enhanced version of SharePoint across 17,000 companies” according to the WSJ and that was back in April 2007. There is a lot of opportunity to look beyond an advertising only business model.
I’m interested. Are startups in Canada building on the Microsoft platform? Take a minute and let me know.
Here are some of the solutions I am evaluating as a rough replacement for the small projects I’m working on.
Infrastructure
Depending on your needs and price sensitivity, other than Mosso there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent of the hosting choices of Joyent, (mt) or Dreamhost (though some might say DiscountASP is pretty similar to Dreamhost). Cartika Hosting is based in Toronto and gets rave reviews on WHT. And Rackforce based in Vancouver offers outstanding VPS price-to-performance plans.
Who are the big hosters in the Windows space?
Development Tools
- Visual Studio Express
- ASP.Net 3.5 includes MVC and AJAX frameworks
- Getting ASP.NET MVC working with Visual Web Developer Express
- CodePlex, specifically, Windows Live Quick Apps that includes Video.Show