robconery

OK OK - edited: Rubyists are very stringent about syntax style, and there are styles WRT to C# but I'm not altogether aware of how you would accomplish the same things that I set out to do.

Specifically: a null check.

It would really help if you watched the video. As I've been saying, this post is in support of the video. I spent 45 minutes laying out all the details.

If you don't want to - that's great but you're comments have no context.

Chest-puffing is when I loudly exclaim that I'M RIGHT AND YOU SUCK. The core of the article is explaining what my talk is about.

It's not a debate. The point is to ask Microsoft to stop being afraid.

The point of the article was more about explaining my talk - which does cover these things.

Overall about 2 weeks total. I took my time and wrote it first in Sinatra, then scrapped and went to Rails - 2 weeks :)

Drivers dude. The drivers are SUCK for using MySQL and PostGreSQL. Couch is fine and so is Mongo but the drivers aren't baked (I worked on one for Mongo - built the initial LINQ provider).

Run MySQL on Windows and see how slow it is. The driver story is horrific.

Tell that to MySQL which runs like an ape through a mud bog on Windows.

When is $10,000 peanuts? Seriously - I'd rather bonus a developer that money then hand it over for something I can get for free.

Look a few comments up - also (from MS themselves) running a site on SQL Express is not a good idea. I would never do that. Once you leave express, you need to license (for the web) by the cpu - which means you're about to cough up a lung.

Ask Jeff and Joel how much they're going to owe - I think it's almost to 6 figures :).

But why? My cost right now (aside from hardware, which is net even) is 0 - without the hoops. Also - the testing story is much better.

Your assumption here is that the blame game somehow is the path to productivity and "the answer". This, to me, means you have a lot of other problems where you work - your platform doesn't matter at all.

You're very right, however in that no one gets fired for using Microsoft - but that's changing. Don't take my word for it - ask the guys in Building 42 - they know it too.

You touch on a very particular, hot topic in the IT world - that having a phone number to Microsoft will solve problems. Sometimes it does - but most often that comes at more than a bit of a price :).

On the flip side - my support channel is Google and I find my answers in about half the time as I would with a topic such as ASP.NET MVC. Rails is quite mature and people have tried everything with it - found where it's great and where it blows. I've had more to read on it than you can imagine.

Anyway - it is a sad truth and one that's about to change as the old guard at your company cycles out and are replace by people with knowledge and pedigree - namely people like me - who will systematically cull the policies that don't make business sense, and keep the ones that do :).

This doesn't mean "ax all things Microsoft" - it means "find the best value and leverage it". MS is changing its focus as it sees this - it knows this shift is coming - it's why ASP.NET MVC is Open Source and SQL Express is free, and more is on the way :).

SharpArchitecture, while swell and neat, doesn't scratch the itch of "this stuff really isn't that hard". There's a metric s* ton of concepts and code in there that are more suitable for a military defense system, let alone a startup.

SQL Server license: $7171 per processor - we have a single quad machine... which we'll likely need to split into two machines, incurring extra licensing fees. Our servers were hosted at MaximumASP and they gave us a bandwidth quote with additional servers that was 4 figures (remember, this is 3 years out).

Visual Studio is $1200 a pop - this is for two people.

I'm already at 5 figures and I didn't include Expression/Media Encoder and so on.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx http://www.microsoftstore.com/s/visualstudio

Our writes to Mongo are few and far between - otherwise I'd be nervous too :)

Can't argue with that. Outside the corporate walls money is king - it's a hard truth and one I was not about to pay for personally :).

It has nothing to do with the technology - it's good stuff and we could have made it work fine. The issue is we want to stay small and not take on the associated cost.

I can see how it might come off like I'm damning the platform - that was hardly my intention. Rails has had 3+ years of Open Source contribution to build out the platform and make it do amazing things - ASP.NET MVC will (hopefully) grow in some of the same ways - but there's a somewhat stunted element to the .NET OSS ecosystem. Hopefully that will change.

They should probably go NoSQL :)