Ask HN: What should I do now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What should I do now?

6 pointsImmortalin9 comments

I have been attempting to create an online App Store for indie game developers who wish to penetrate the Chinese market. The AppStore will have a chinese front end to appeal to chinese consumers and a developer portal for developers to submit their apps/games with the option of using a translation service e.g. Duolingo to translate any text files etc.. However, I foolishly chose to implement the website in asp.net web forms thinking that it would be similar to a Winform app. Boy was I wrong, The drag and drop gui builder did work the same way and I could not get the Bootstrap theme to work at all. I have hit a brick wall and I have no idea what to do now. I am now considering redoing it in Ruby/Python but I have no other web development experience beyond implementing a helloworld in the bottle micro framework. I have done a mockup of the website in winforms but it is nowhere close to what I envisioned it to be. I was hoping for a look similar to the chrome AppStore. Should I just give up on this idea and move on to other things or should I continue?

Oh dear. Do they still have that Drag/Drop stuff in Visual Studio? Sorry to hear you got bitten by it.

Those tools have never worked. And for some reason, somebody at Microsoft really wants people to use them anyway. The first thing that everybody learned was to stay well clear of the drag/drop interface builder and anything that seemed like it existed only to support it. In 2001, that lopped off roughly 90% of ASP.NET and left one with a really nice platform for development.

It's actually surprising to hear that it has persisted all the way through to ASP.NET MVC and the new view engines. I hadn't heard of anybody getting bitten by it, had to advise anybody to steer clear of it, or even seen it in any version of VS.NET since 2007.

Apologies that the message never made it through. Don't use any of that stuff, and you'll find that the Microsoft stack is quite a good platform to build off of.

Depends on whether you are interested in this a business opportunity or a technical challenge.

If business and the projected revenue looks sufficient then maybe you should get a technical co-founder. You could learn a lot from somebody with more developed skills.

If a technical challenge then maybe you need to improve your skill-set. Building an AppStore requires more than programming skills, you will also need design and UX skills, etc. The key is to choose a suitable framework and then learn the underlying language.

I am more interested in this as a business opportunity. I have attempt creating it with Drupal and some ecommerce modules but they are not suitable for it.

Then find someone to partner with that is interested in the idea (I myself find it interesting as a developer) and bring them on as a partner. Be generous with equity. Don't assume the idea and mockups entitle you to 90% of the equity despite them doing 90% of the actual work to make it a reality.

I recommend doing a proof of concept to see if you can accomplish what you want using python, ruby, and ASP.NET MVC. Don't implement the entire application. Just implement one functional slice of it from front to back.

Also, if the technology is really holding you back then I would guess that you are not interested enough in the project. That you are considering giving up on the idea altogether is another tell. You can make anything work if you really want to.

I don't know if you should give up, but if you don't like the product redo it. Save the old version just in case, though. That's the benefit of startup culture, being lean. Ruby/Python sounds like a good base, I would at least give it a try.

Thanks!

Learn Ruby on Rails or Python. That will take time, but it is worth it!

Don't do drag and drop if you can avoid it. There will be problems with drag/drop, no way around it.

Good Luck!

Thanks

Reply on news.ycombinator.com