Our startup is based on .Net and hosted on Azure. I don't think I realized just how uncommon this was until we were invited to Microsoft in Redmond and saw the excitement from the developers when they learned that we were a startup.
We love the framework. But its definitely not the only stack we use. I also agree that there are bad .Net developers that spoil it for the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the issues seem to be associated with ASP.Net and claiming to be a web developer without understanding how the web actually works. Many of them are so into just using the tools that they never bother to learn Javascript and instead insist on doing Postbacks for everything.
I feel that we're starting to see a new side of Microsoft when it comes to the web and startups.
Things like ASP.Net MVC, Azure and BizSpark give me hope.
I agree. Our company builds products for many startups on top of ASP.NET MVC and it can be EXTREMELY difficult wading through the terrible webforms developers to find the developers with a strong core understanding of how the web works. For us we actually focus much of our attention on developers from outside the .NET world, as we've found they are able to wrap their heads around low level javascript much faster, and relatively speaking picking up C# syntax is relatively trivial.
The developer issue is the thorniest issue with choosing the .NET ecosystem. It's easier to find a .NET developer than a Ruby/Python/what have you, but it's harder to find a good .NET developer.
What I like to do is advertise for Python and .NET skills. That weeds a lot of bad ones out.
I think the issue is with Webforms specifically. Webforms abstracts away so much of the way the web works that developers who have spent their careers developing on it never actually understand how the web really works. Concepts like Viewstate hide the realities of web development. The fact that almost all processing takes place on the server-side means they are weak at client-side debugging, etc.
That said, I don't think it's fair to hold the same opinion of ASP.NET MVC developers - as it's essentially the same level of abstraction as Rails.
Having just spent the past couple of months learning webforms ASP.NET coming from a PHP/RoR background what you said is exactly what frustrated me.
Knowing how webforms tried to warp how the web actually works was truly annoying. I understand why they did it, but it really does not help a web programmer in the long run.
And if .NET 4.0 didn't allow you to use ClientIDMode to set your own element IDs I'd have lost it entirely.
Lots of people pick up a bit of .NET in business school - just enough to get hired for an entry-level programming position. They don't teach any programming fundamentals in those classes.
After they're hired at a bigcorp, the devs get by through cargo-culting and leaning on the GUI, so they never learn to actually program. Visual Studio is a great IDE, but it's too helpful for the beginning programmer. 5-10 years later, they've got enough "programming experience" on their resumes to get hired as "senior" devs.
That was written in 2004, when Python was nowhere near as popular as it is now. Ruby is also really popular today too, and thus fits in the category that PG was lumping Java in.
If you want a comparatively esoteric language today, try ML or Haskell.
"Genius" may be overstating things a bit especially now that Rails has gotten pretty popular. You do find some people in the Rails world who are a lot like PHP programmers[0] these days, and you do need to take care to weed those out. That said, you'll probably have to do a lot less weeding out to find somebody to work on a Ruby project than a .NET, Java or PHP project.
[0] In this context, a "PHP programmer" is not simply a programmer who uses PHP, but a programmer who uses only PHP and is almost certainly clueless about CS fundamentals.
There are definitely 2 distinct cultures of developers using the MS Web Stack. Webforms (what most people typically think of when they thing of .NET) is an attempt to get desktop developers on the web. While it's possible to get good markup out of Webforms, most of the default features are a table-based, inline styled abomination. Until MVC came out, I actually worked on an open source project that focused on fixing the markup generated by ASP.NET.
That being said, the new generation of ASP.NET MVC devs is top notch. People like Scott Hanselman and Phill Haack have helped make some vast improvements in the stack.
Its working well for us. Its been interesting growing our company along side Azure. My company http://IActionable.com launched around the same time that Azure went RTM. So we've been through almost every bump and challenge together. I definitely have my list of things I wish they would change though. I consider myself one of the more squeaky members on the Azure Forums. Most of my issues are with deployment speed and Azure Table Storage features.
Our company is part of an early adopter program which is the reason they invited us to Redmond. We got to meet the Azure teams and really drill them with questions. I came back with a better appreciation for what they're trying to pull off. It feels like they're trying to build an race car and drive it at the same time. Microsoft wants to be attractive to the corporate world and smaller businesses at the same time. That's though.
The documentation isn't fantastic but I blame it on the speed that they are moving. Luckily there are some pretty smart and available developers that contribute to the community. Guys like Steve Marx (http://blog.smarx.com) and Wade Wegner (http://www.wadewegner.com) really know their stuff. I met them on my last visit. We've actually been invited up for another round of Azure 'sneak peeks' in June.
We love the framework. But its definitely not the only stack we use. I also agree that there are bad .Net developers that spoil it for the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the issues seem to be associated with ASP.Net and claiming to be a web developer without understanding how the web actually works. Many of them are so into just using the tools that they never bother to learn Javascript and instead insist on doing Postbacks for everything.
I feel that we're starting to see a new side of Microsoft when it comes to the web and startups.
Things like ASP.Net MVC, Azure and BizSpark give me hope.