[chrislomax]

While I agree with some of these points the biggest one for me is client adoption.

All clients assume everything is run in Linux. I don't even know why this mindset is so popular.

When we develop something and the client wants to host it I can guarantee (more or less) that the platform is Linux and they want to know why the software we have written doesn't work on Linux.

I know there is Mono but I always use IIS to run our software as that's what I am used to and that is the platform is is meant to work on.

I do love .NET, I've used it since it was launched. I do want to have a change though. I just don't know what language to dip into next.

I'll never leave .NET though as it's where I really started programming (after VBA...). I've just discovered Umbraco too which I've just fallen in love with.

Recommendations on languages I can try would be appreciated. I don't like this minefield we are in at the minute, I never know what is going to stick around and what is a fad.

[pjmlp]

> All clients assume everything is run in Linux. I don't even know why this mindset is so popular.

Might be on your part of the globe. On my little world, we have enough Windows only clients to keep us busy.

[chrislomax]

We are based in the UK. I don't know if it's the clients and the type of work we are filling but we seem to be migrating a lot of people from Wordpress so typically they expect everything to still run on Linux.

Our clients are normally ones who have come from a small background and are growing quite rapid, this customer is almost certainly on some type of Linux offering.

It's probably a mix of the clients we target and the geographical location.

[skriticos2]

Try Qt. It's a mature cross-platform framework with a long history back and a good momentum forward. It's also very well deigned.

http://qt-project.org/

[yakz]

Qt5, CMake, C++11. It's definitely good enough to use.

[codexon]

Maybe because of license issues? Windows also uses more resources.

[chrislomax]

I think this is what frustrates me. We've slowly started reducing the amount of Windows machines in our cluster as the licensing for SQL went from £160 a month per CPU up to £240 per CPU in the space of 2 years.

This is unacceptable.

We can't run a business trying to guess what this will be in another 12 months time.

Resource is a big issue, I recently fired up a small Linux box on Digital Ocean as a test; it's 512mb with a small CPU. The machine barely runs at any overhead when dormant. A Windows box is using 1GB before the operating system has finished loading

[_random_]

You can try Clojure - it is both CLR and JVM. Lisps seem to never die completely :). Definitely not mainstream though.

[chrislomax]

Thanks.

I know this is something I can do right now but a few things I wanted to look at was node.js and Angular.

I'm definitely in need of catching up on some new techniques, I've been so engrossed in doing paid work that I've not had time to pick up a book and get back to the fun bit of programming