irasmith

I have been trying to figure something out and perhaps I have just looked at it so long that I have gotten myself confused to the point of missing it or perhaps it isn't that clearly spelled out. I am very familiar with Crystal Reports, I know what it is and what it does. I haven't been able to get what Crystal Enterprise is though. I have read the promotional material on the Business Objects website, but I come away asking myself "do what?" So pardon my confusion but I am just curious as to what the difference is between the two product lines. :confused:

Yes, uptime is of importance to me. I realize everyone will have hardware/network issues at some point in time, it's just the nature of the beast so that part won't upset me. My present PHP/MySQL provider has had a couple of those times but as it should be service was promptly restored and I'm no worse for the wear. I will keep looking into this as I continue my steps forward to open up a .NET based site as well.

Now that is quite interesting to know and thank you for bringing that point to light as I had not looked at OSX options. Your idea of a daisychain made me chuckle. Truthfully who knows where it will all end up. I just try to learn what I think will be useful and press onward. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I get it wrong. That's when I backup and punt a bit :cool:

When I first began researching .NET before taking the plunge into it myself, I rather got the idea that J# was to be an avenue for those who had used J++ from MS to migrate to the .NET platform. I also got the idea that J# was to be a potential way to entice Java programmers over to the .NET platform and away from Java. This is not to say it is a perfect replacement for Java as really it isn't Java per say. But it was to be somewhat of a familiar home to those who would seek to make the jump to .NET. True, .NET is actually available for the MS Windows platform at this time, made possible by MS itself. There is the project called Mono which is making a .NET framework available for the Linux environment. Personally I can't vouch for their progress as I have only begun to research this myself. I have not seen anyone else attempting to port .NET to their environment. That doesn't mean that it won't happen as I tend to think others are waiting and watching what might happen. .NET does give MS a vantage it never had before, that being the ability to allow programs and applications to be moved to other platforms other than MS. This will become a necessity if the Linux movement keeps going and growing. Without .NET, MS stood to loose it all if another operating system ever made any noteable gains in the marketplace. With .NET, MS may not get the whole pie but they can have a good slice of it if their apps are ported to .NET and if the fees for VS.NET remain fairly high. Keep in mind that MS recently extended support for Win98 citing that there was a concern a good number would switch to Linux rather than pay for the upgrade fees and potential hardware retrofits or purchases. Also keep in mind that .NET solves other issues that were at the heart of problems for MS. The main one was the infamous DLL conflict. Please keep in mind as you read this posting that I am just sharing my observations, nothing more. I really don't rant, rave, or flame so never view anything I post in that light. What I am saying is in no way a negative reflection on MS. Actually I truly belive .NET is a very good thing all the way around. The IDE is very polished, at least to me. I do not know for sure on this, but if other language vendors ported their language to .NET, wonder if it would be that their language would be accessable through the .NET IDE? If so then you really have a good draw as at that point as long as your preferred language was ported to .NET then you could have the vantages of the wonderful IDE found with VS.NET. I can't recall where I saw it at, but I have seen one Cobol vendor port their product to .NET. Now I am not saying everyone run out and learn Cobol, but I truly found this to be amazing and happy that other language vendors are beginning to port to .NET. I hope this rambling has been insightful to some. I am still amazed and impressed by what I am seeing in .NET, the IDE in VS.NET, and the many potentials it has for so many areas. :)

Thank you all so much for your posts. I will check out the resoures you listed as I work toward selecting a .NET hosting provider. I also thank you for the explanation of the VS.NET hosting question. I really did not know what that meant and am glad to know that some providers provide that ability. I do not need to make use of it as I have my own copy of VS.NET Professional that I will be using to program with. With the suggestions you have provided though it does look like I will be busy researching the options :)

I have started looking at web hosting for .net, just the initial stages to see what is out there and what type of pricing there is. I came across something that I'm a little puzzled about and maybe some of you who are more experienced than I can enlighten me. One place I came across made special note that their hosting service allowed you to handle VS.NET projects. I thought that whatever you did in VS.NET became compiled to whatever type you opted be it a class library or whatever, and that it would work accordingly in a .NET environment. So I am a bit confused by the special billing the hosting provider was providing VS.NET. Just seeking knowledge and understanding at this point and hopefully some of you can help out.

I won't argue regarding the install of various open source apps through a control panel. You will have to be the judge of that if you can pull it off or not. While I am aware of things like Dot Net Nuke and Rainbow, I so far haven't actually installed them on my workstation so I do not know the ins-and-outs of how easily or difficult an automated install can be. The Post Nuke cms and other PHP based Nukes seem to be very easily molded to install by a script and so some hosting providers have made that available. Since I haven't installed Dot Net Nuke or Rainbow, I also don't know what their documentation is like for users to follow. I hope to soon be getting into that so I can find out, but right now beyond downloading the zip file for each I have not progressed any further. My suggestion was just a throught and certainly doesn't mean it is a 'show stopper' as I am sure there are plenty out there that will work with the various cms packages and get them up and going on your hosting service. So if it isn't doable through the control panel then I can understand that. When I actually begin my .NET hosting provider shopping, the primary things I personally will be looking for is a good base configuration that will allow me the web space and SQL space to get a Dot Net Nuke or Rainbow cms site up and running. Beyond that, an email account or two with the ability to check it through the web. The true key will be the ability to upgrade my package as necessary when I find I need more SQL storage space or web space. Give me a way through the web to place a support ticket when I or my site are having difficulty. Aside from the normal things of FTP'ing files up to the site and doing backups, I think that about covers what I myself would be looking for. I think that should make me a very happy camper :)

From my perspective as a programmer and tech support person, I would say that you as a hosting provider would be better serverd to keep your services strictly MS based and not utilize PHP/MySQL. Now, I use PHP/MySQL heavily and have nothing against them so don't get me wrong there. The point I want to drive home is that you as the hosting provider have the potential for endless issues from users who want to use their PHP based apps which utilize .htaccess files or other features that Apache handles but IIS doesn't. That doesn't make IIS bad, it simply means it is a different product and doesn't know about the native nature of a product similiar to it but still different from it. Perhaps the matter can be overcome through a targeted marketing strategy. What I am thinking of here is things that would convey you are the specialist and your choosen speciality is MS products which provide and enhance .NET web site hosting services. Set yourself apart from the others by being the one lone force out there that chooses to be different, a leader which others will have to follow as you aren't a follower trailing behind the crowd. I really don't know how doable this idea is, but hey you can look into it and see if it is a route you want to take or not. You ever thought about catering to the Dot Net Nuke or Rainbow content management system crowds? If you have, you might just be a big hit if you had your control panel set so that a customer could install the package to their site with a click of a button. There are a lot of hosting providers over in the PHP world that do this for Post Nuke. I personally didn't use that option as I wanted to upload a newer version of Post Nuke to my site than what the control panel would have installed. But it is an easy convenient way for a non-technical user to get a cms pacakge installed on their site. All they have to do then is just begin setting it up the way they want it. Some providers, like the one I use, go a step further and have a listing of the most popular open source PHP/MySQL based programs available for one-click-install on my hosting space. I haven't researched the .NET hosting services in depth yet, but in my initial research I haven't seen that type of catering to the public. Perhaps the best part is, with an good listing of open source products utilizing .NET that the user can see and select from, possibly their desire to use a non .NET option will diminish. True, I can still upload through FTP whatever I care to for my site, and I usually do, but not everyone works with this stuff day in and day out like we do. So it is a much nicer way to let them have their hosting space and take some of the headaches out of the installation process. I suppose in all of this I am trying to say that if you show a potential customer all the things that are .NET based and that can be easily loaded through this super control panel they will have access to, then the need for non-.NET products isn't there since you have proven to them they can have a super site without going any further than their own control panel. These are just some late night thoughts I've had. Certainly not trying to tell you how to run your business, just trying to give you some food for thought. :)

Thank you very much for taking the time to make a posting here to ask the questions and get an idea of how you could make a desirable hosting solution for .NET. Yes I do understand that .NET hosting will never be as cheap as PHP/MySQL due to the open source nature of those products. I think as long as the pricing is reasonable for what you get then I'd be a happy camper :) I am not exactly sure though what combination of things for a price is reasonable though since I can only speak for myself. Personally, my main desires lay in having disk space to allocate between programs and SQL datastorage. While email is important I don't need 30+ email accounts or anything like that. My .NET site would be more of a site to showcase my .NET web work, advertise programs I am writing for resale and storing those programs for electronic download by users who purchase them. I used FP a few years ago for a short bit and I just didn't like the product all that much. The extensions caused me no end of headaches, but again this is just me talking here. I have used various FTP programs throughout my computing career and have no issue with continuing to do so. I have Cute FTP Pro and really enjoy it. While I did not realize you could publish from directly within VS.NET I don't know that I would be using that feature of it. The main thrust of what I will be doing is establishing either a Dot Net Nuke or Rainbow site, using additional modules and writing my own. So I think I could use FTP to upload those easily enough. In terms of Control Panels, I have used one hosting provider who did not have such and my current hosting provider who does have one. Even though I do have a technical background and am used to doing things "command line style", I must say that control panels are really a great thing to have. Personally, I like the ability I have to back up each of my databases separately. It places the backup on my local machine here at home. There is a restore feature within the control panel that works the reverse, lets me name a file on my local machine to restore to the hosting provider. There is a separate backup feature which lets me backup the contents of my html directory and related subdirectories as well, storing it locally also. The control panel lets me create my databases, delete my databases, create my database users, assign permissions to the user, and assign the user to which database. There are other features of the control panel my hosting provider has, but I have mentioned the important ones. I can't speak for existing .NET hosting providers since as I haven't seen any detailed specifics on the control panel. For .NET hosting I would think it would also be important to provide the ability to use the various versions of the .NET Framework. I realize right now there are only two but I suspect that there will be another release in the near term future. In terms of support, I hope there will be a way to place support tickets to the staff. Over time possibly use some of that data to provide a FAQ area or a 'search tech knowledge base' type setup to look for help before placing a support ticket. Personally I don' t know if you should include PHP with a .NET service or not. I am a big fan of the Post Nuke cms package writting in Post Nuke. I know the plans exist of abstracting the database layer to the point you could use any SQL database so it would permit it to run in a MS SQL environment. However, people won't get the full benefit unless the Apache web server is running as well. There are programs that run with Post Nuke that are expecting to make use of .htaccess type files and IIS doesn't have a method to use them. They seem to be unique to Apache it would seem. So in the end I am not sure how much PHP usage you would see on your hosting system. While my own thoughts may change over time, at this time I plan to keep the two separate. My PHP/MySQL site for things related to it, my future .NET site for MS related things. I have saved my bittest pet peeve for last though. Personally speaking I hope that the admins of the servers will not be left to modify server configs or settings at will or to perform upgrades on the servers without letting the users who are on those servers know they are doing this. The first PHP/MySQL hosting provider I had started out doing ok, but within a few months it was a continual thing of configs being redone without announcement, upgrades to servers being done without us knowing about it, only finding out when the upgrade didn't go right and our sites were down due to it. It finally go to the point where one month I spent more time trying to keep my site up and running than it was actually up and running. Bad thing for someone who works a full day then comes home to develop code and the website is their medium to the public at large showcasing what they have done. Finally, enough was enough and I switched providers. I have been with the new provider almost as long as the former one and my downtime has been substantially less, and I have been a lot happier :cool: I realize that everyone will have downtime, just the nature of the beast. But it is a completely different story when it is self inflicted by the sites admins just because they wanted to change the config of the server I happened to be on. I do hope this helps you out some in trying to decide what services to provide the .NET community.

Personally, I am not quite to the point yet of launching a .NET website, but I do plan on it. I currently have a PHP Post Nuke based website, which I will still maintain since my interests are in both arenas. I will be happy to share my thoughts on what I will be looking for in a .NET host and hope it helps you in deciding what to provide overall. Yes, I think MS SQL should be included as part of the hosting plan package. This is not to say a client is required to have a database, but if they so choose to then they can avail themselves of the opportunity. Perhaps you would permit two or three databases for the client. I have found this feature extremely useful on my site using one database for Post Nuke and another for Moodle (on line eLearning system). Moodle isn't a Post Nuke module, has it's own datatables, and operates independently of my main site. The needs/frequency of backing it up are different than that of my main site. I think ASP.NET should be offered but I am not personally wild about FP extensions simply because I don't use Front Page for any web design work. The type of site I am targeting to offer for the .NET hosting will be one comprised of the Dot Net Nuke cms package or the Rainbow package. I am sure cgi would be a good benefit to offer as you can still use a lot of cgi and JavaScript in the .NET environment. Cost will be a big factor. This is one area where I have had a bit of sticker shock when investigating a .NET hosting environment compared to my PHP/MySQL environment. Without naming names, I get 1 gig of space to be chopped up however I use it between HTML, PHP, MySQL. I get a high level of email accounts, more than my site would ever need. The price is $6.99 USD a month. When I began looking at .NET hosting, I am finding that it takes about $20 a month to get somewhere around 500 megs of space, which you divide up between your web pages, programs, and database. Many times MS SQL ability is not in the base price and so it goes even higher per month. Basicially what I am finding is that it will cost me somewhere around three times as much as my PHP/MySQL site does yet have only half of the capacity in terms of disk storage. I realize there are cost factors involved and I don't think I'll ever see a .NET hosting package as low as I'm used to paying for my PHP/MySQL site, but perhaps a more reasonably comparable package would help entice others. The cost difference won't stop me from having a .NET website but I certainly will keep shopping around for awhile longer. Hope this helps.

This may not be of any help to you, however I thought it worth posting anyway. If you haven't already done this, you may want to take the various borads and cables apart inside, dust it down real well, and then re-insert the borads and reconnect the cables. I've had to do this a time or two in order to get a computer that has been sitting idle for long periods of time to come up and get going again.

The question posed was a good one as I myself had often wondered about searching on three letters. The answer was equally well as I did not know how the forum index worked and now know something new. The answer also is great in knowing that we will eventually be able to search key three letter words. Things just keep getting better and better here :)

Interesting to hear the perspective of someone who has been involved with the rent-a-coder situation. I rather stumbled onto the site myself a few months back. I have just been watching to learn and satisfy my own curosity about things as I had not seen a site like it before. Personally I've never been one to be into competitive bidding and so I don't plan to attempt to become a rent-a-coder coder. Yes, a lot of IT jobs here in the states are moving off shore. Mid December IBM was in a bit of a about that subject. I am not trying to stir anything up and not trying to flame anyone. If you want to read some information on it, the forecasts by analysts, and such then you can head over to cnet.com and do a search on 'offshoring' and you will get a number of articles. Open Source, like all things, has advantages and disadvantages. I do see the good in some cases, such as here where this Open Source forum software allows a meeting of the minds among programmers to exchange knowledge and seek/provide help and assistance to others. I use an Open Source CMS package for my website, it has allowed me to learn what a CMS package can really do as well as introduced me to PHP coding. I just purchased VS.NET Professional for my computer here at home and will soon be diving into another Open Source cms package, Dot Net Nuke which I am hoping will allow me to learn VB.NET better as well as see how ASP.NET fits into all of this. So just personally speaking, for me these have been great learning tools. I can't use them at work in part because you can't go stripping out the copyrights, etc and it's not exactly in vogue to have a multitude of third party icons and images on a corporate site. Just some thoughts on a Friday evening after work from a programmer who is about to rest and relax for the evening and spend the weekend with their nose in their Professional C# book :cool:

I would have used a 'two thumbs up' if there had been an icon for it, but one thumb up will have to do to signal my statement of "Way To Go" on doing such a great job and getting the mention for it. Totally awesome in my book. :)

I can only speak from personal experience here so I do hope you find it of help. I have not seen any forums such as this for which you must pay to be a member, read, or make postings. So I really don't know how good of a money maker a forum in and of itself would be. Perhaps there are a lot of others out there who are willing to share, devote time to answer questions, and otherwise help spread the good word about whatever it is the forum focuses in on. While it is true that I myself tend to ask more questions in this set of forums than answer that is only because I am new to the subject matter of .NET and am using the advise and wisdom of those who are more experienced to help me learn as I progress. Other forums where I am more up to speed on the subject matter, there you will find me answering more questions than I ask, so I do give back once I have mastered what I am trying to learn. I have seen forums used for the most part to provide discussion and support areas. Most of the time the forums I have seen and used are provided by a developer who has released a module. I am into Post Nuke cms system pretty heavy, have my own website running Post Nuke. Many of the module developers have forums as a part of their site so users of the module can post bugs, get advice, share tips and tricks of doing neat and unusual things with the module, and so on. I have just started to get into the forums for Dot Net Nuke and Rainbow, two popular cms packages one done in vb.net the other c#.net. My personal view is that forums in and of themselves may not make you a lot of money. As ad addition to your site to supplemnt or enhance your site and provide a way for users to communicate with you about a product or service you are offering, they do wonderfully in my view. The cost of the forum will vary depending if you are using an open source package or a commercial one. Also, depending on the environment the forum needs to run it your cost will vary. If you have an open source forum that uses Linux, PHP, MySQL, and Apache the cost is very minimal indeed since all of those items are open source products. If you go with a hosting service then you can get some pretty good deals on disk space/bandwidth setups. Hope this helps you out.

The vantages of the .NET framework are many fold actually. My ears began to perk up in its early stages when I heard about the versioning system that would be employed to help end the agony of conflicting DLLs. With the looming release someday of the 64 bit chips, the platform also provides a way to help migrate programs to that environment. For those who want to explore the realm of theory, it does also provide a way to 'turn on a dime' if the Linux world gains further speed and begins to be used more commonly on the desktops. Since C++ has been ported to .NET, MS could readily re-write their office suite in either that or C# to provide an alternative to the Star Office and Open Office suites that run on Java under Linux. I realize the heated debate regarding if Linux could ever gain ground on the desktop, and I don't mean to start a debate here as that is not my intent. If you were in the MS position and your office suite could become less of a seller if another operating system became prominent, and you had no plans or way to quickly provide your product for the new environment, you would be in a world of hurt. So there is nothing wrong with making plans to handle the situation if it arises and I see .NET as a way of doing that. So there are plenty of reasons why the need for .NET and this may not be all of them. I just happen to see these reasons as some pretty big motivators myself.

Please let us not attempt to place one over the other in the family of .NET languages. I have never been a person on either end of the extreme, I'm rather a middle-of-the-road type of guy. So I feel for each there is a time and a place or purpose that it is best suited for. Actually, in my initial readings before deciding to devote time and effort to .NET, I noticed some authors were even suggesting that other langauge vendors port their languages over to the .NET platform. Perhaps I am a bit miss-guided in my thinking, but to this newbie it would seem that the language itself wouldn't matter so much if it was true to the .NET platform. Now how pratical it would be to port other languages over to .NET I don't know, but for those of us who are explore things and dream of the possibilities, that option does hold potential. For those of us who are Trekies, you could almost view the .NET platform as the universal translator allowing diverse inputs but providing output that we all understand. Also, another way to look at it is in the cost factor. When I was shopping around I noticed that most of the time the price of an individual language professional edition was very close to the price of the VS.NET Professional edition. In the end, I opted to buy VS.NET. Figured it only made sense because with it I get all the .NET languages so I am set to learn as few or as many as I desire to devote my time to. And by the way, I really enjoyed IcePlugs comment of 'oh bother'. Very much said the way my childhood and adulthood hero Pooh would put things. Nothing ever seemed to trouble Mr. Pooh very much. He held steady to his constant search for honey and enjoyed the company of his friends along the way. So let us enjoy our quest for knowledge and enjoy each others company along the way.;)

Very true on your comments and I in part in my post was just putting a bit of light hearted humor into things. I'm new to .NET but I can see already some of the minor differences between C# and VB.NET. I had actually begun mystudies with VB.NET and then things changed at work and the decision was made to go the C# route instead. So I changed the direction of my studies and am now getting absorbed in C#. Even if the languages do diverge over time and grow farther apart, the underlying .NET framework will still be the same. I realize right now with only minor differences between them it is easy to learn, support, and program applications in either or both of them. I too would hate to loose that vantage as at this point I would still like to pick back up on VB.NET studies at a later point in time. Guess I like to be flexible to handle a lot of situations. But I won't get discouraged over it. I'll keep on with C# and use class library approach to things if need be to get my workings to work with VB.NET programs others write.

Perhaps a word to the wise might be to learn C# and just focus in on it then :)

I do thank you for that very well thought out and worded reply. It will most likely be the weekend before I actually get to ordering VS.NET, but I think I'll give it a spin for a year and see how it works out for me. I will pass for the moment on MSDN magazine simply because my efforts need to focus on C# and VS.NET in general. When I get to the point where I need to broaden my horizions even further then it does sound like the logical choice to go with. And true, the forums here are a great place for help. I do plan to keep coming back to them as I progress in my work at learning these technologies. Thanks a bunch for the advice from everyone :)

Good suggestion on the MSDN magazine. I think my only concern is that its coverage may be too broad based for me at this time. I am still new to .NET and at this point am wanting to focus in on C# and VS.NET and really learn those technologies. Perhaps this is why I am swayed at this time to give VS.NET magazine a try out as it seems to be focused in on the things I am seeking. If you feel this is in error or that MSDN does the same thing then please let me know. I haven't previewed an issue of MSDN magazine and so I am clueless about its focus.

reboot, Thank you for your input. I had wondered about the size of the magazine as I had subscriptions before to similiar type ones and they too were pretty thin. But I think I may give it a try out and see how it goes. Looks like you get a trial issue free and I'm going to view things from the perspective that quality is better than quantity and go from there. :)

True, no need to publish a magazine if you publish all the articles to the general public on the website. And really that is one reason for my initial question. Since I can't locate a printed copy of the magazine I wasn't sure if the articles on the site were truly representative of the quality of information the full publication contained. The articles on the site look great, but I didn't know if that was the 'best of the lot' or perhaps just enticements and articles of just as good or even better quality were in the printed copy only. True, searching the web does take time and I spend quite a bit of time doing that now for one project or another. My collection of programming and computer related books continues to grow as I buy and read more as well.

At least for me, sometimes it is more convenient or just easier to have a printed publication to read while sitting out on the deck enjoying the evening sunset/early night air and read. Other times it comes in handy when visiting relatives and I get a case of 'just can't get to sleep' yet not able to connect to the net and surf since don't have a laptop. I noticed the site does have some articles on line, however, I don't know if they publish all their articles on line or not. I noticed you could check out the table of contents for the February and March issues and what I saw looked interesting to me. So with my curosity sparked I had to ask my question here to see what others experience or comments were regarding the publication.

Ok, I'll confess that I pretty much live under a rock...working during the day at the office then home at night to study all the wonderful new stuff with .NET and work on my website. So sometimes it takes me awhile to get in tune with the 'real world'. I happened to stumble onto Visual Studio Magazine and from what I can tell on the site it looks like a good publication to have. I haven't been able to find any printed copies at the magazine stands. So do you think this is a good publication for those of you who subscribe to it? Please, I'm not looking for bashing or anything like that, I just really want some informed opinions which I will use to decide if I should subscribe to it or not. Thanks for the input :)