Ever hear of business requirements? Systems analysis? Changing user specifications? A good portion of that 8 weeks was irreducible, regardless of platform. The actual ASP coding time was less.
You pay for IIS and SQLServer when better, cheaper alternatives would actually work better.
IIS is free. SQL Server is cheaper and easier to administer than Oracle, is superior at data transformation (a big deal in our shop), and supports stored procedures, which the free MySQL does not.
If you're a small shop, you could save a mint by migrating off of MS-only. Your dev time could have been faster, and your end product far better.
Ever hear of training expenses? Learning curves? Legacy code?
MS *did* fail to provide you the best, cheapest solution. And your company stays with them?
They provided us Visual Studio .NET, which is good and cheap enough for us. Traditional ASP's shortcomings at the time the application was originally developed are now irrelevant.
Are you certain your company doesn't have a strategic partnership with MS?
Such a partnership could only be established by me...so, no.
You are trying too hard to score propaganda points. Java isn't for everybody.
In my experience, trying to pay a vendor like MS instead of paying for training and in-house expertise will burn you every time.
As I said, in my experience there are better, cheaper solutions available that will involve less risk and fewer unknown product defects (which are *ceratinly* in .NET right now). MS has burned you already. Ya'll don't know it, because you don't know the alternatives.
IIS isn't "free", nor is SQLServer. I wouldn't use stored procedures for data input, I would seperate that logic out into code (it will run faster, and won't be a 'single-db' lockin).
I'm always amazed that MS's sales pitch of "use our solutions, you don't even have to be an expert to use them!"
Yes, you do. Or else you pay for it in the end, every time. If you're paying MS instead of developing your own tech expertise in-house, you will get burned. You'll pay more, and end up beholden to that single vendor. You have to use IIS (which is *very* inferior). And SQLServer, which is adequate but far over-priced (even compared to Oracle, because Oracle is a better far, far better DB as far as scalability is concerned).
Don't get me wrong. Java is not for everything. It is slightly slower to execute, so if you've got a flight-sim or something that has to number-crunch a million policies overnight, then use either C++ or Cobol on a mainframe.
But for web work, it is absolutely the very best, cheapest, fastest technology going. You are paying more for the MS solutions, and you're getting an inferior product. If you're "MS-Only", you might consider doing an analysis of non-MS techs and see if you really want to stick with the single vendor lockin.
Just a suggestion.
Add to that unreasonable managers who can't make up their minds on how they want an app to work and dissatisfied users who will complain no matter how well the apps actually works.
Thankfully, I'm now self-employed! ;-)