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EDIT: I just looked at a page of "Understanding .NET" by Chappel and, on that page, he hints that MS only reluctantly ported vb to keep those coders happy but that vb.net and c# work practically the same way. I read that book last year and I have a feeling that was where I read some of those comments.
The most expensive part of development is paying the programmers and the IT support staff. Any tool that allows the programmers to work more efficiently saves a lot of money.
It has been my experience that Microsoft products are the easiest and most reliable from the perspective of the programmer. For example, everything you do in Oracle seems a lot harder and to take a lot more time than to do the same thing in SQL Server.
I think ASP.NET is great. A big company messing with tools like PHP where aren't as highly refined are wasting their money. PHP and MySql seem more popular with tiny websites where webmasters are too cheap to pay a few extra dollars for Windows hosting.
I'm paying $35/month to host a SQL Server/ASP.NET website, and yeah I could have done the same thing with cheap $7/month Unix hosting but I feel that I'm getting my money's worth with the premium solution.
[port80software.com...]
The numbers are plain. And no, they are not just 'numbers', check the A - Z list of the top 1000 companies yourself.
A big company messing with tools like PHP where aren't as highly refined are wasting their money.
MySql seem more popular with tiny websitesYou mean like Yahoo?
The price differnce between Microsoft and free solutions like PHP and MySql is mostly irrelevant because the biggest cost is the cost of paying employees and consultants to use the tools.
I have no idea why Yahoo or Amazon don't use Microsoft. I'm not saying they should. They are both old sites and existing back when Microsoft's web tools sucked.
Web tools are like all other areas where MS takes the lead. MS software initially sucks, but they through billions of dollars at the problem and copy their rivals and come up with the best software in the end. Internet Explorer originally sucked compare to Netscape. Excel originally sucked compared to Lotus 123.
ASP.NET is the best tool in my opinion, but before ASP.NET MS's web tools sucked.
How much does it cost those companies in licenses to upgrade their OS every few years?
How much does it cost those companies to upgrade their hardware to run the new OS every few years?
How much does it cost to retrain VB programmers to VB.NET because they're not the same?
How much does it cost to train programmers for C#?
How much does it cost for security upgrades and attack monitoring?
People need training and specialization whether they use Unix or Windows. It's just that Unix has 30 years or more of stability while Win changes every few years. MS products may be easier to use in some cases but there are equivalent packages in Unix or, in my case, everyone knows how everything works cause it was what we work with and what we learned in school. So, for many of us coming from college training, we already know how to use the tools and training isn't necessary.
That being said damn did I ever waste a lot of money and time getting my MCSE on NT 4.0 in '99.. only to have it to be obsolete about 2 months after I was finished.
I guess coming from Seattle the Starbucks effect has weighed heavily on MS's marketing efforts; sell someone coffee that's pretty much the same as the 7-11 coffee, but create an atmosphere of complexity and depth so that people pay $4 instead of 69 cents.
I still believe MS has cleaned up it's act. Just got my (very large) ASP.NET 2.0 book from Amazon and am getting ready to jump in..
People need training and specialization whether they use Unix or Windows. It's just that Unix has 30 years or more of stability while Win changes every few years. MS products may be easier to use in some cases but there are equivalent packages in Unix or, in my case, everyone knows how everything works cause it was what we work with and what we learned in school. So, for many of us coming from college training, we already know how to use the tools and training isn't necessary.
Secondly, regarding software costs, I've explained in every message that the license fees paid to Microsoft are very small compared to the much larger cost of paying programmers and network admins and other IT employees.
Regarding security, I have no reason to believe that Unix or PHP or Java are less secure, rather the hackers are currently more interested in attacking MS software because (1) it's used more; and (2) they hate MS. If some other standard rose to priminence over MS you can be sure that the hackers would hack into it with glee.
Regarding the annoyance of upgrades, yes I hate it, but I don't see how leaving the MS world means you've left upgrades. Doesn't the version of Java keep changing every year?
How much does it cost those companies to upgrade their hardware to run the new OS every few years?
I love upgrading. It tells me that the sofware is making it a point to make themselves better. How are things ever going to make progress if you never enhance any features?
I never worked at a company that spent any money on training at all.
The programmers figured out how to use the tools themselves.Learning a new tool requires time along with the errors along the way. Those programmers were then paid for their learning time along with the books and software purchased.
rather the hackers are currently more interested in attacking MS softwareThis could be true. A new book I read implied that open source may not have the same problems because it is created by the collective "we".
Regarding the annoyance of upgrades, upgrading for me is an ongoing process. I don't worry about a new Java++ or Java# coming out every couple of years. MS might come out with a new OS and a language or method to use it every couple of years.
Java upgrades are seamless but a MS house may have to learn .NET. I gave up learning .NET while studying C# because I found out there was a new Cw language being touted in a MSDN article.
The hardcore Unix programmers have always done everything in C. Not much changes year to year. Sure things get better, some new script you can use, an OS addition but, essentially, everything stays the same and works.
How much does it cost those companies to upgrade their hardware to run the new OS every few years?
I love upgrading. It tells me that the sofware is making it a point to make themselves better. How are things ever going to make progress if you never enhance any features?
What if Tim Burners Lee thought that his idea was a complete waste of time?
what would be doing if we were still on Windows 95?You don't understand what I was saying. Where I worked we used FreeBSD. Updates to software can be checked daily. If a version updates from 1.01 to 1.02, you can choose to update automatically, if you wish, right then and there. When FreeBSD updated from 5.3 to 6.0, we updated over the internet the same day it became available. (For free of course.) No need to be retrained or learn anything much that was new. I don't recall what the upgrade did other than add built-in wireless functionality and some improvements to the code but none of our programs, or the look was different, just that it ran faster. But when you upgraded from Win95/98 to XP, you might have had to buy faster hardware and more ram. The first system we upgraded was a 550Mhz P3 running Gnome.
BTW, FreeBSD has been able to run 64-bit quite a while before Win would.
Where I worked we used FreeBSD. Updates to software can be checked daily. If a version updates from 1.01 to 1.02, you can choose to update automatically, if you wish, right then and there. When FreeBSD updated from 5.3 to 6.0, we updated over the internet the same day it became available. (For free of course.)
I believe you're comparing apples with pears. Upgrades are not free (updates are however), but Windows is commercial software, so it is a different case entirely. If you were to have a support contract with a FreeBSD vendor, you would have to pay in the same way that you pay Microsoft.
I don't recall what the upgrade did other than add built-in wireless functionality and some improvements to the code but none of our programs, or the look was different, just that it ran faster. But when you upgraded from Win95/98 to XP, you might have had to buy faster hardware and more ram. The first system we upgraded was a 550Mhz P3 running Gnome.
Again, apples with pears. With UNIX, the interface and the OS are seperate entities. With Windows the two are together. If you update a UNIX without updating your UI (Gnome) then it's unlikely to need more resources. However if you were to switch to a more demanding UI such as KDE, you would need to buy more hardware if your system wasn't powerful enough. The same is true with Windows. Other aspects to bear in mind are new features, which are added by default with Windows which is not so apparent with UNIX as they thend to employ an "if you need something, learn about it, find it, install it" attitude.
In my experience. If you take a copy of Windows 2003, and uninstall the new components, services and remove the new features of the UI, it requires the same, if not less resources than Windows 2000. This equates to a similar functionality of a UNIX update.
The difference is not technological, it's philosophical . UNIX and Windows are different animals targetted at different people. UNIX philosphy states that the user should be given the bare bones and install the features. Windows is quite the opposite, adding more features to the core operating system and it's then up to the user to remove what they don't need. Some people prefer the former, some people prefer the latter.
The criticisms come about when a user without technological knowledge installs and uses the operating system. If they install UNIX, they don't get what they want done. If they install windows, they can get what they want done, but it's done inefficently and with security issues. We can argue all day which is better. the truth is that they're just different with different advqntages and different disadvantages.
How much does it cost those companies that invested in ASP training to find out now they should do asp.net but they aren't actually compatible?
How much does it cost those companies in licenses to upgrade their OS every few years?
How much does it cost those companies to upgrade their hardware to run the new OS every few years?
How much does it cost to retrain VB programmers to VB.NET because they're not the same?
How much does it cost to train programmers for C#?
How much does it cost for security upgrades and attack monitoring?
You're obviously biased against microsoft; how do you expect us to take you seriously?
I purchased Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server (Standard) for $600 AUS ($400 US?) and thats IT.
For our business thats included patches, updates, email(exchange + outlook) IIS 6, backup. And all of this just works once you boot and remove the install CD's.
It doesnt cost more, and I have several ASP sites running on there which I have developed over the past 2 years with little more than VB 6 skills.
The next major server release isnt due until the end of 2007 (Longhorn Server) and even then it will continue to run my existing websites no problem - as they have done since I was using PWS included with windows 98 years ago.
I think its all about the companies IT decisions made years ago - todays webservers are generally just a logical extension of their older infrastructure.
New businesses generaly pick the platform they are most competitant with - and vigorously defend that decision afterwards ;)
With FreeBSD we didn't need to change anything and were able to take old hardware, including the P3 I mentioned and one guy even used a 120Mhz pentium for development. We didn't have to learn anything new, we didn't have to buy anything, everything was stble, documentation was good, ongoing development that wasn't going away, etc. etc.
In our case, the cost was $6000 to $8000 for server, sql, visual studio, and everything.
And that cost is nothing compared to $100,000 per year per IT employee.
Actually I pay myself in German beer.
And that cost is nothing compared to $100,000 per year per IT employee.I don't get the connection. Unless you are saying using asp.net can be used by less expensive personnel. The same could be said of PHP.
I'll chime on this one. I think the folks pointing out the cost differential between initial purchase/development and maintenance have hit the nail on the head. MS products in general, and .NET specifically, require less skilled resources to develop and maintain. A corporate customer can pull non-IT resources (meaning they don't have CS education or backgrounds) and morph them into developers much easier on MS platforms than open source.
I think you see proliferation of MS in corporate shops because they're more into body counts and don't fully recognize a stand-out developer is worth 100X more in productivity than an average one.
My .02.
Again : great site.
At the time of the decision we were on Sun boxes with Netscape web servers. It was not inexpensive hardware by any stretch of the imagination.
We were coding in Perl, there was no PHP at the time. Compared to Perl ASP was very easy to use.
MS had done their homework and knew corporate Amercia had all it's info in databases. MS made it very easy to connect to Sybase and Oracle DB's.
There used to be a saying that said "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM". The same could be said for MS.
