Choosing the right Development Tools for ASP.Net

After a lot of posts about very generic startup stuff, its probably time to talk about something that’s more technical in nature. After all, we are supposed to be a Consumer Internet startup with a strong technology leaning. I am sure there will be more topics to discuss on the technology front, but I felt an ideal start would be talking about our choice of our Development Toolset.

The entire founding team had worked for a considerable amount of time at Microsoft, and therefore the .NET application stack was very familiar territory for us. We felt pretty strongly that picking technology that we already had expertise in would make things easier, especially since we had made the choice that we would develop the site and any components surrounding it ourselves. Looking back, I think we would still agree with that decision because it has kept things very simple for us as far as managing our aggressive schedule was concerned. I don’t know if things would have been the same had we gone a different way, say with the LAMP stack, but my guess is that the steeper learning curve, especially in the early days might have posed some challenges.

So, given that the technology choice was fairly straight-forward, we also needed the right set of tools for our development needs. Clearly, we wanted nothing to do with pirated software and only wanted Genuine Software but it is also common knowledge that Microsoft’s products aren’t exactly cheap. And for a startup, if something is not cheap, then it is not an option. The web server (IIS) and the database (SQL Server) came with the hosting package (more about that in a later post) we purchased for our production needs, we still had to worry about our own development machines. That is where the whole Express SKU came in very, very handy – I think Microsoft has done an absolutely fantastic job with these Express products to counter the Open Source challenge. On our dev machines, we had SQL Express, and for the IDE, we took the same Express SKU of Visual Studio, both of which are free for download on the Microsoft website. Note that the Express SKU comes with its own set of rules, but I am sure the License Agreement has more exciting facts on the Terms of Use, so be sure to read it if you choose to use this SKU.

When I first started using the Visual Web Developer 2008 Express product, I expected a lot of the functionality to be unavailable because it was a free product – to my pleasant surprise though, I really don’t remember feeling limited at all. Setting up the site as a project, running an instance of the site from within Visual Web Developer 2008, stepping through the code, setting up breakpoints and debugging the running instance, all of these were remarkably straight-forward with the Express product. In fact, the whole task of setting up my project and getting a running instance of our site from within VWD took me no more than a couple of hours. And if you are familiar with the VS IDE, you will find the VWD Express experience to be very similar – highly intuitive, lot of convenience built in, allowing you to focus on just your own code instead of having to worry about the rest of the infrastructure. Two thumbs up for Visual Web Developer Express, especially considering it didnt cost us a single penny to use. What you don’t get are the more Enterprise features such as the Team System features, integrated bug tracking, code repository etc but chances are you’ll not need them in the very early days, so this is a great stopgap solution. And its all VS, so migrating your code should not be an issue when you are ready to migrate to the paid versions.

As I stated earlier, we have a lot of reasons to be biased towards Microsoft, so take my recommendations with a pinch of salt. However, if you are committed to the .NET stack and are looking for a cheap approach to get things going, then the Express SKU is a god-send. On a somewhat related note, I recently tried to set up a pilot LAMP site for a different project I was working on. The pilot was free, the download was fairly straight-forward and the instructions in the README were pretty simple, but after a long and frustrating exercise, I still couldn’t get the thing to work. Only some cryptic error messages (a problem that folks typically attribute to Microsoft products) and not-very-useful log files, nothing that could help me resolve the issue. I’ll continue to fight that battle and I think Open Source is great, but there is something to be said about software that comes from the Microsoft stable, they definitely do a lot of things right.