"As many of you know, our original intention was to maintain .NET Reflector as a free tool. But, after two-and-a-half years of providing it without charge, we realized that we could not make the free model work. We know that this will cause pain for some people in the .NET community, and we apologize for the change in policy.
As a commercial company, we need to charge at least a nominal amount to keep .NET Reflector up-to-date and relevant. Without revenue coming in, we cannot dedicate a team of developers to ensure that Reflector remains a valuable part of .NET developers’ toolboxes."
They gave it a shot, for 2.5 years, and it didn't work. It's hard to fault them. Consider how ridiculously low $35 is for any tool of this sort, I don't think this is some money grubbing effort on Red-Gate's part.
I have used .NET for all my start up endeavors. Like others have suggested, it just works for me since I have background in .NET and windows development.
Although I have experimented with Ruby and Python both I never felt like the incurring the cost of learning curve while trying to complete a project. In my opinion my customers do not care about the language the application is written in as long as they are accessing it from a browser.
One thing I want to point out is that the monthly costs for VPS are much higher compared to linux nodes and it has a significant impact on hosting costs every month.
Perhaps a large percentage of startups are using .net but not mentioning it to HN for fear of not sounding cool like Ruby or a NoSQL platform.
We use it because we know it and can launch something fast. It does everything we need it to do, maybe the backend is not very elegant, but functionality wise, it's all there. For us, getting a userbase and revenue going is far more desirable than learning the new 'ultimate platform that scales to the universe'.
Yep, we're .NET through-and-through. Our main product is written in C#/F# and is a tool for .NET developers, and our website is built on the WISA stack.
MS has managed to recover a lot of good will in the last half decade. That probably accounts for quite a bit of it. I know I've dropped a large part of my criticisms. I'm even using Office and looking forward to my next laptop and Win 7.
And 99% of what I do is simple tools that can be done in .NET with a few libraries from Codeplex and a little UI work.
I'm not in a startup or anything, but consider this; cloud computing is gaining momentum fast, and lots of startups will use cloud platforms like EC2, AppEngine, Azure etc.
The one thing about this change is that traditional licensing concerns go away. If you use Azure, you are paying by usage, so Windows licenses aren't in play. I guess my point is that the fear of launching a startup and having to face spirling license costs (for using MS products) is going to decline as more people adopt cloud platforms.
Not a startup but I'm using it. I was doing Java for awhile but we started getting into .Net at work. I happen to like it a lot better, and it works nicely for me. The only problem I have with Microsoft stuff is that it's so damn hard to keep up with the curve. I'm still learning parts from the .Net 3.5 framework and 4.0 has been out for nearly a year already...
I know one of the authors, David Srbecky: he was in my class at Cambridge. His final year undergrad project was a decompiler from IL to C#, so he had a big chunk of code for this lying around already - the Reflector changes provided the motivation to finally clean it up and publish it.
interesting points made about this tool and in regard to licensing and cloud computing. I agree this tool is useful in checking /testing licensing schemes, and as i am in the process of completing the development of a dual key encryption system for windows apps (web apps later maybe), i will find this tool very useful, however, the software business in my opinion is ultimately about the total cost of delivering the app/data to the end user. Cloud computing probably is the main platform for future apps as the platforms for delivery are so diverse, windows, mac, linux mobile ... but keep in mind, total cost of cloud computing could rise, and there are some apps which have to be run locally for any number of reasons ...
[+] [-] jeroen|15 years ago|reply
"Our commitment is to maintain an amazing free tool ..."
http://www.red-gate.com/our-company/about/news/net-reflector
february 2011:
"Red Gate has announced that it will charge $35 for version 7 of .NET Reflector upon its release in early March"
http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-development/reflecto...
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|15 years ago|reply
"As many of you know, our original intention was to maintain .NET Reflector as a free tool. But, after two-and-a-half years of providing it without charge, we realized that we could not make the free model work. We know that this will cause pain for some people in the .NET community, and we apologize for the change in policy.
As a commercial company, we need to charge at least a nominal amount to keep .NET Reflector up-to-date and relevant. Without revenue coming in, we cannot dedicate a team of developers to ensure that Reflector remains a valuable part of .NET developers’ toolboxes."
They gave it a shot, for 2.5 years, and it didn't work. It's hard to fault them. Consider how ridiculously low $35 is for any tool of this sort, I don't think this is some money grubbing effort on Red-Gate's part.
[+] [-] rbanffy|15 years ago|reply
I'm curious, so:
AskHN: Are you using .NET on your startup and why did you chose it?
[+] [-] jswinghammer|15 years ago|reply
- I like C# as a language. It's easy to work with and the compiler catches a lot of things that would be runtime errors in php or python.
- I like Visual Studio a lot. I'm far more productive in that environment than anything else I've tried in other languages.
- For what I'm doing the cost of Windows is far less than the lost productivity working in another environment would give me.
- SQL Server 2008 is just awesome.
- Using LINQ to SQL has saved me a ton of time.
[+] [-] sourc3|15 years ago|reply
Although I have experimented with Ruby and Python both I never felt like the incurring the cost of learning curve while trying to complete a project. In my opinion my customers do not care about the language the application is written in as long as they are accessing it from a browser.
One thing I want to point out is that the monthly costs for VPS are much higher compared to linux nodes and it has a significant impact on hosting costs every month.
[+] [-] henrikschroder|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gigantor|15 years ago|reply
We use it because we know it and can launch something fast. It does everything we need it to do, maybe the backend is not very elegant, but functionality wise, it's all there. For us, getting a userbase and revenue going is far more desirable than learning the new 'ultimate platform that scales to the universe'.
[+] [-] meier2|15 years ago|reply
My background is Windows dev, that is why "we" choose it in he first place.
[+] [-] profquail|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkr-hn|15 years ago|reply
And 99% of what I do is simple tools that can be done in .NET with a few libraries from Codeplex and a little UI work.
[+] [-] JonoW|15 years ago|reply
The one thing about this change is that traditional licensing concerns go away. If you use Azure, you are paying by usage, so Windows licenses aren't in play. I guess my point is that the fear of launching a startup and having to face spirling license costs (for using MS products) is going to decline as more people adopt cloud platforms.
[+] [-] artmageddon|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HelloBeautiful|15 years ago|reply
1. We already know it well and it's good enough.
2. Things just work. Somehow I'm expecting to face lots of strange problems in RoR with stuff like encoding, threads, networking.
[+] [-] mariusmg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkr-hn|15 years ago|reply
Either they work fast or were already working on this.
[+] [-] batterseapower|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easilydeasily|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel|15 years ago|reply