The biggest roadblock to .NET use in startups is, IMO, cost. It's not a cheap solution. It's also very unsexy and there's a lot of stigma around using Windows for web servers--in the past this was generally justified, but today? Not so much. I've built example/sandbox systems with three ASP.NET MVC servers behind an nginx static content/load balancer and it was absolutely awesome.
ASP.NET MVC is as pleasant to work with (ASP.NET WebForms not so much). "Frustrating development environment" literally could not be further from the truth; for my money, there is no development environment, anywhere, that comes close to putting as much information at your fingertips, as effectively and quickly, as Visual Studio. Microsoft does a lot of things wrong, but Visual Studio is a great example of a well-done development system.
And if your founder's primary tool is ASP.NET (again, hopefully MVC), it'd be stupid not to use it.
The biggest roadblock to .NET use in startups is, IMO, cost. It's not a cheap solution. It's also very unsexy and there's a lot of stigma around using Windows for web servers--in the past this was generally justified, but today? Not so much. I've built example/sandbox systems with three ASP.NET MVC servers behind an nginx static content/load balancer and it was absolutely awesome.
ASP.NET MVC is as pleasant to work with (ASP.NET WebForms not so much). "Frustrating development environment" literally could not be further from the truth; for my money, there is no development environment, anywhere, that comes close to putting as much information at your fingertips, as effectively and quickly, as Visual Studio. Microsoft does a lot of things wrong, but Visual Studio is a great example of a well-done development system.
And if your founder's primary tool is ASP.NET (again, hopefully MVC), it'd be stupid not to use it.