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0 pointsalexjplant3y ago0 comments

It's snobbery to have an opinion? In terms of both static and application web servers I've personally administered nginx, Apache, IIS, Tomcat, Wildfly and Websphere and mention them here in descending order of preference with regard to capability and DX. As you can see IIS falls squarely in the middle of the pack and is actually a distant third in my opinion. The only compelling reason to use it a decade ago was to host .NET applications in an officially-supported manner (and even then it meant contending with licensing, weird logging behavior, arcane MMC-controlled XML-based configuration, Windows Server itself, etc). In the age of .NET Core there's no reason at all.

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louthy3y ago

> It's snobbery to have an opinion?

Of course not and I didn't say any such thing. The original comment "People use IIS?" is clearly a passive-aggressive dig at MS, its tech, and those that use it (as is so often the case in tech circles). It's quite pathetic and childish. If I misunderstood that, then I apologise to the author, but I'd argue it still adds nothing to the discourse even if it was asked honestly.

It doesn't mean you can't hold an opinion on the relative merits of any one piece of tech. But this "my computer is better than your computer" immature schoolboy nonsense is pervasive in tech circles and is extremely tedious.

I have no love for IIS, but it's a perfectly capable webserver and is clearly still used. The idea that the .NET world have all moved over to .NET Core is also a wishful one unfortunately, I still maintain my open-source libraries for the legacy framework as I know there's plenty of places that can't just 'flip the switch' to .NET Core. It's not quite as bad as Python's V3 moment, but it's up there.

rbanffy3y ago

> "People use IIS?" is clearly a passive-aggressive dig at MS

Feels a bit snarky, but not too aggressive. Windows is not a popular choice for cloud platforms and those users seem to be overrepresented here. I can imagine someone being genuinely surprised it's used for more than serving documentation that's already on a Windows server.

That said, as I mentioned earlier, it's hard to find a use case where IIS (or Windows) is a better choice than any of the popular open source http servers and app platform runtimes.

There is a colossal corpus of .NET Framework code out there and I wouldn't be surprised it achieves the status of COBOL (but with a lot less charm) at some point in the future - where code on it is maintained ad infinitum even though almost nobody would deploy a greenfield app using it.

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