Comment by vyrotek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vyrotek | Hacker News Reader

We've had our share of surprised faces when we told people our company is based on .Net as well. There were a lot of reasons for us to use the Microsoft stack. One of them was also existing expertise. My CoFounder and I previously worked as C# developers for years before working on IActionable.com full-time. And yes, Visual Studio is that awesome.

"AppHarbor - It's Heroku for .NET. You simply can't beat it."

I agree with most things in the article except for this. Its definitely my personal opinion, but I don't think AppHarbor is quite 'there' yet for a lot of companies. At least it wasn't for our company's specific needs. The .Net community is very unique and has very different expectations from other service providers. We typically eat what Microsoft feeds us and trust it. Microsoft is definitely putting a lot of weight behind Azure and it made sense for us to use their platform. I saw the level of support behind Azure first hand when our company was invited to Redmond to meet the dev teams as part of an early adopter program.

> was invited to Redmond to meet the dev teams as part of an early adopter program.

I think that's the problem I see with Azure. AppHarbor needs no early adopter program. It's great for the same reason that Heroku and Rails were great for people: if you want to get an MVP up and running, it's almost instantaneous. I want to focus on my core product first and delay thinking about seriously scaling and the other major benefits of Azure over AppHarbor.

In their defense, Azure's target is not startups or 'hackers' with a toy app. In fact, it makes no sense at all pricing-wise if you only run a single webserver and database. Their pricing covers a large and growing set of features.

Microsoft's programs exist because of the insane amount of features and support that have to go into their products for their enterprise customers. And its those features that really make us stick with Azure for now. Specifically, I'm talking about TableStorage, Queues and AppFabric's Distributed Cache Service. I've already had a small chat with the AppHarbor guys before. I'd definitely love to move if it made sense.

Don't get me wrong though. I definitely have my gripes with Azure too.

Azure can make sense pricing wise for startups that have been accepted into their Bizspark program (which doesn't take much). Bizspark gives basically a single web server and database free and you can easily scale from there if you are willing to pay.

On the downside, deploying to Azure is a bit of a pain and its 15-20 minutes per deployment gets old, especially early on when you are deploying more often.

And yes, Visual Studio is that awesome

To me, that's only true once you have Resharper installed too,

Resharper is fantastic for speeding up programming and refactoring, I like to add vim to the mix (something like http://www.viemu.com/) for "simple" text editing as well.

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