Rob Conery

I'm sure if you Google around you will fine a number of opinions on why the majority of startups don't go with .NET, but I'd say it is possible it is simply because many .NET developers love in the 'enterprise' world and are far away from the startup world most of the time. As a .NET developer I'm seeing this starting to change but it is only just starting.

There are certainly some disadvantages to .NET particularly when developing for the web, namely it's web framework maturity, ease-of-use and the lack of a strong open source community. These things are often cited as reasons why, say rails developers, are able to go "faster". And by faster we are not talking about performance but time to build your product. I'd say I find the last one, lack of a strong community as a big factor.

Anyways, I probably can't help you answer this personally, but here are some recent posts by fairly prolific .NET bloggers on why they decided to start moving away from .NET for what they feel are greener pastures in the rails community.

http://davybrion.com/blog/2010/08/how-i-feel-about-the-net-world-lately/
http://wekeroad.com/post/7468824379/i-find-your-lack-of-faith-invigorating
http://osherove.com/blog/2011/1/2/the-journey-begins-and-why-it-starts-with-ruby.html

And a specific article about Rob Connery moving his startup from .NET MVC to Rails and why
http://www.infoq.com/articles/architecting-tekpub

Again I don't mean to advocate rails over .NET, but I wanted to answer your question…

I am also trying to navigate the same jungle for a new project. Here's what I could find in the last few days. I am not an experienced programmer likewise, so take this with a grain of salt.

1) I would argue this is a close call between Angular and Ember, and I personally picked Angular, mostly for philosophical reasons. I am sure Ember is just as good, it just doesn't work as well for me. [1]

2) SQLite is good for personal projects, as far as I know. It's a little too accepting of faults in your code, but when you want to get up and running as soon and painlessly as possible, it does the job. Otherwise use Postgres.

3) Angular has a list of good video tutorials at [2], though other than this and the official site, I have yet to find any good documentation. Which might either be my lack of Google-fu or a genuine need.

4) If you understand what MVC is and if you have coded with Javascript before, it should be easy to pick up. Pay attention to file structure, the scope, best practices, as especially with Javascript being a permissive language it's very easy to get away with low quality code that'll hurt you badly later. Have test coverage.

[1] http://blog.wekeroad.com/2013/03/06/ember-confuses-me

[2] http://egghead.io

I would be worried about the lack of community integration in the asp.net platform if it was stagnant - but it's not. It's moving forward very rapidly. I guess he's unhappy that he can't contribute to that progress. I agree, it would be nice if MS at least reviewed contributions from the community but I imagine that is something decided by lawyers and not programmers in a company that size.

Personally I prefer stability in a platform over the exciting ups and downs of open source projects. I just want to get stuff done. I want my challenges to be in the code I write and not in maintaining a patchwork machine.

Finally, as a support base I find the .net community to be very good. Just look at how large and helpful the community on stackoverflow is. Communication from MS is also pretty good. You would certainly never see Scott Gu pull one of these:
http://blog.wekeroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/dhh-fu.jpg

Lol, love that vid. :)
Actually I happened to have gone down the same road as Rob Conery: http://wekeroad.com/building-things/tekpub-a-six-pack-and-you

Except in my case, since I was learning as I went, I didn't have time to figure out why the less-mature technologies weren't working just right. Or I'd look at a problem and see it solved nicely for relational DBs, but still needing some manual work to make it work with a NoSQL DB... and when it came down to actually getting stuff done, I hated writing code I didn't have to write.

That's actually an interesting thought: if you're trying to learn a technology, doing a startup is the wrong thing to do. Because ultimately you are just wasting precious time on things that the business side doesn't care about. I hit that "conflict of interest" quite a bit through this process.

I think screencasts are as good as the presenter. The best screencasts are much like a good 10 min pitch. They should tell me the problem, show me the solution and leave me excited and wanting to find out more!

One of my favorite ever screencasts was Rob Conery's on BDD with C# with the MSpec framework[http://blog.wekeroad.com/mvc-storefront/kona-3/] It was put together so succinctly that it really clicked with me what BDD was all about and I came away wanting to download the tools and learn more!

If your screen cast is on Vimeo you could add the little bookmarks on the video time line. This could help users skips to sections appropriate to them.

Oxite has caused a big brou-ha-ha in the .net community. Apparently the ALT.NET crowd wasn't very happy with how Oxite was created, and it is recommended that it shouldn't be treated as something to emulate with your own code.

http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/archive/2008/12/15/oxite-oh-dear-lord-why.aspx

I think most of the ALT.NET community over-reacted and started acting like a bunch of jerks instead of providing more constructive criticism. I like the way Rob Conery handled it better by actually providing suggestions to make the application better.

http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/some-thoughts-on-oxite/