august 2008:

"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...

From the second link:

"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.

The money grubbing part is that the existing free version will expire and you will no longer be able to use it. So even if you are willing to use the existing product (which doesn't require a "dedicated team of developers"), you are out of luck.

If they allowed this old version to float-around, it might tarnish the brand.

Also, what stops people from saying "it's money grubbing to have a crippled freebie like this and demand $35 for full version".

$35 is nothing. I wrote decompilers and they're pretty damn hard and require constant upkeep and testing.

There is a difference in "They still offer a crippled freebie for download on there site" and "They disable the version that I have on my computer that works just fine, and force me to pay money for features I may not be interested in". If they don't want to offer a free/old/crippled version anymore, I don't blame them. But if I already have the software installed on my pc today, and tomorrow it doesn't work, that's really lame.

There were confident they could maintain a free version; they tried (really hard, I might add) to make the freemium business model work with Reflector, but in the end, they just couldn't.

BTW, have you ever considered that if Red Gate didn't buy Reflector from Lutz, he might've stopped maintaining it for free on into perpetuity? That at some point, he might've realized that he was giving away something that people found extraordinarily useful, and might have tried to monetize it himself? What if, 2-3 years ago, we were instead reading a blog post from Lutz saying that he was going to start charging $200/license for Reflector, effective immediately? Would you still be so morally outraged? If not, why?

Yes. Free and unmaintained from Lutz would have been better. There are A LOT of free plugins for Reflector out. Everyone is thinking about Reflector itself and ignore the work of plugin authors who extended Reflector because it WAS a GREAT FREE TOOL for the .net community. Without a free version all those plugins are useless. I see no problem if Lutz tried to monetize. I would have bought a license first and foremost as "thank you".

Also, how the fuck they tried "really hard" to maintain freemium ? Since they brought Reflector they basically added the VS debugger integration FOR MONEY. How is that trying really hard for the free version ?!

Just to be understood correctly. I don't have anything against RedGate. In fact , as i said, they made some great tools. But grabbing one of the best FREE tools in the .net world and trying to monetize (after pledging for a free version) just makes them seem assholes.

It seems the number of startups using .NET is increasing, or, at least, the interest on it by the HN community is growing.

I'm curious, so:

AskHN: Are you using .NET on your startup and why did you chose it?

I'm using it and like it a lot here are my reasons:

- 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.

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.

Have you tried hosting on mono/linux? I'm curious about this, myself.

I have not yet used it because as others pointed out I rely heavily on SQL Server 2005/8 to use Linq To SQL in my solutions. Even if I can host the application on a linux box, I still need a windows box to put the DB server on.

However, I've been looking at postgreSQL for a while and it looks ok. I am curious if anyone has tried this before.

Has anyone done this with MySql/PostgreSQL?

We're using it, because we knew it, and it just works.

I agree.

(Macintosh : PC with MS Windows) in 1995 = (.NET+C# : Java) in 2010

The latter is cheaper and has more choice, but the former fits together so much better.

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'.

We do. It works fine, no reason to switch.

My background is Windows dev, that is why "we" choose it in he first place.

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.

Plus: If you go Azure where will you develop? Will some nice M$ guy install Visual Studio in the cloud and you will use remote desktop? Where will you test? No local dev servers, really?

Besides that, Azure is NOT usage payed, Azure is an approximation to that I would call scalable server rental. You pay by time and size, not by use. Maybe that explains Azure's momentum, they're getting things right and discouraging people by having expensive/inadequate prices. I hope they get it right soon, and that they start billing by usage.

I do .Net at an agency and I like it but it's amazing how much noise there is in the Microsoft ecossystem.

I would imagine the license costs for dev tools for a startup are neglible. If you run Azure you would setup test/staging instances and tear them down when not in use, again because of scale, I would imagine that cost is negligible.

As for usage costs, doesn't Azure use the same model as all the others, e.g. EC2, in that cost = compute hours (i.e. instance running) + data transfer + storage? So if by usage you mean ultra accurate per CPU millisecond billing, then I don't anyone does that? Would be great though. Happy to be proved wrong though, I'm no expert on this...

I agree that the dev tools license costs for a startup are/should be negligible, I was just pointing that Azure isn't a substitute for a dev environment (and it's licensing costs).

I also think that the problem of the production environment costs is a good one to have, nobody should fear to start a business because of them. If you can't solve that problem it means you have the wrong business model or really bad engineers.

Oops my bad, I tought others did the billing by CPU load instead of by hour.

I'm still waiting for some nice L1nux dude to come setup all my free linux servers for testing...

Plus: Compared to salaries, license costs are negligible.

Exactly....for all this FUD about licensing costs, if that's the difference between make or break, or affects your profitability in a major way, then you have a lot bigger problems than your licensing cost.

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...

We do, because:

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.

And it's done by the #develop team. Great work guys.

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 ...

I checked back at my comment on the announcement (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170957) and was amazed to see it was only two weeks ago.

Either they work fast or were already working on this.

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.

Whoa! That was fast. A good working application in a few weeks.