With the announcement of Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla‘s new job at Microsoft and David Crow‘s move prior to that, since both of them are fairly prominent in the Toronto tech scene and both were relatively on the “other side” (whatever that means) before the new jobs, I got to thinking about Microsoft’s position in Toronto’s developer culture.
There’s no question that they’re well placed at the enterprise level, but when I meet new people at events like DemoCamp, Ruby on Rails Project Night, etc the majority of them seem to be former PHP people who discovered Rails. When I mention I’m in a .NET shop, the reaction isn’t hostile, but it’s also along the lines of “I haven’t tried that, so there’s not much to talk about here.”
I’d go so far as to say it’s not on the self-taught coder’s radar, and here’s a big part of the reason why: most self taught coders in 2008 are writing for the web, and it’s not easy to get decent .NET web hosting at a “let’s poke around for a bit” price.
If I can’t host my app and share it with the world, why would I spend the time learning to write it? Sure, there are $9.95/month plans out there, but they all seem to be for a single domain, while the Unix world can easily get a plan for less than that with as many domains as they want to host (subject to the usual fine print about load etc.)
The best thing that can possibly happen for Microsoft in the startup community is about to happen when Amazon launches full Windows Server support in their EC2 offering, scheduled to happen later this year. Everyone’s looking at the cloud (including us), and while there are other platforms out there (some including MS support already, like Mosso), all I (and I assume everyone else) ever hears about for serious production deployments is Amazon, at the moment. Having Windows Server support on Amazon could be HUGE for ASP.NET adoption, depending on pricing and licensing restrictions etc.
Speaking of which, the next big hurdle is SQL Server, at least from the perspective of adoption from the open source community. It’s expensive, and from a PHP/Rails perspective, it isn’t MySQL. Microsoft obviously doesn’t want to say this too loud, but I will: MySQL works just fine with .NET code. We’ve been using it for years. That’s right, I’m a Microsoft Certified guy with no clue how to connect, administer, or even turn on a SQL Server box, and it hasn’t stopped me from getting things done.
(Although actually, it’ll be interesting to see what Amazon’s system is like for SQL Server.)
Oh, and if any Rails people are tempted to poke around the latest technologies, I can’t say much about Silverlight (I’ll be learning more at TechDays later this month), but Microsoft’s MVC framework (now in beta!) is a great way for Rails developers to give .NET a try. “MS MVC is like Rails with a better IDE” wouldn’t be a bad way to describe it.
So, in Toronto, at least, things are starting to merge into a perfect storm for at least a modest increase of .NET-based startups here in Toronto (and elsewhere) – prominent hires, cloud support, MVC, and alternate database options. I’m looking forward to seeing more cool stuff out of the next DemoCamp or two or three, even if I have to write it myself (as soon as they release “full apps in 4 minutes or less” technology, that is.)
Update: If I followed the “don’t post anything until you’ve read all your feeds” rule I’d write even less than I do now. That said, Scott has an overview of the new Web Application Installer. Spiffy and interesting (and beta and not for XP, the latter being more of a stopper than the former for me at the moment.)
Leave a Reply