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Comment by joseph_cooney | Hacker News Reader

I'd be surprised if StackExchange was in the top 100 largest .NET web applications (I guess it depends how you define size, but I've seen apps with much larger code bases, bigger infrastructure, and bigger data sets, and I live in a relatively small country).

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I think it's likely it's one of the top 100 by traffic, but (not to belittle the achievements of the Stack Exchange guys) I'm sure there's at least 100 bigger sites out there by code/infrastructure.

Flight booking systems come to mind. I don't know how many web applications Microsoft would have individually (I imagine they use .NET...) and whether you want to count those (microsoft.com, bing.com, accounts.live.com, Azure...). Not to mention in-house web applications.

And Dell, Xbox, Bing, Nasdaq, Chase, and on and on. SO is a great site but it's neither the largest nor the coast complex.

They do. Windows Update is an ASP.Net application, for example.

According to the fairly suspect Alexa they are in the top 100, world wide (regardless of technology). So by traffic I guess yes, they are in the top 100.

Quantcast puts us at #54 in the US (haven’t managed to find the global rankings on their site). https://www.quantcast.com/p-c1rF4kxgLUzNc

One can't forget the London Stock Exchange clusterfuck, but then again that was three years ago.

Clearly you can't forget it. Some teams can succeed in a wide variety of languages, some organisations can fail in any language.

Given the number of teams that have succeeded with .Net, I'd say that organisational failings are to blame for this one. Have you already forgotten the reputation of the consultants hired to implement it?

Actually I used to think the same, until I discovered who did the job.

Currently, I think it failed thanks to the usual quality of outsourced projects with off-shoring developers than tooling.

Of course it is always easier to blame the tools.

I think you can put TradElect down to hiring monkeys rather than professionals. It would have failed in C++ and on the JVM with those guys.

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