Competitors of Visual Studio and C# [closed]

Question

We are developing an open source and free large scale database driven web application. For this project, we have already chosen PostgreSQL as database platform and have started the database work.

We have been using Microsoft technologies for a while and are really impressed with the integration of many things inside a single box. With Visual Studio and it very easy to get it working.

For our new project, we do not want our customers forced to pay for a Windows Server license and thus are looking for a new technology, similar ASP.NET (may be better or worse) that would enable a license free deployment on the client site.

In addition to the web technology requirement, we would ideally like an IDE with the web technology that offers integration between the IDE and the OS & Servers (web server, debugger, etc...) like Visual Studio does. The IDE can be commercial or free.

Ideally we would like to stay with ASP.NET and be "free" at the same time.

We are not considering "Java" for the project because of Oracle threat. We have also considered Mono but are afraid of using it in the production environment.

Answer 1

Have you consider still working on .NET and deploying your application with Mono?

That way:

1. You get to keep using Visual Studio (I don't think you'll find anything like it)
2. Your customer won't pay Microsoft Windows Server license fees.

You could even stop using Visual Studio and start using MonoDevelop instead, and you get to keep your developers team on its current language preference: C#+VB.NET+ASP.NET

Answer 2

Mono is mostly compatible with .NET (see here) and has a development environment similar to Visual Studio called MonoDevelop. We've used it a little bit at work as an experiment to see if we could build and run our Windows services and websites under Linux. We experienced mixed success, but your mileage may vary.

Most of the build problems were caused by Linux filesystems being case-sensitive. Apart from that it was quite easy to get things going, save for getting licensed components to work (licensing is a bit tricky as MonoDevelop has no built-in support for it). However, simply drag-dropping a pre-built Windows application to the Linux host allowed us to run it just by clicking the EXE, and it worked like a charm.