Indie-Resource.com

Just curious on thoughts about this. I know many people say it is not a good platform but I would think it is better than PHP. Better OOP language and VS IDE. Would there be any interest in this? A open source web game or a "engine" build with C#.

I think ASP.NET MVC would be great for a PBBG. However, Web Forms I feel would greatly complicate things if you intended to have a lot of client-side code.

I would say both MVC and web forms could be a good options as well as plain web services served as ajax backend for a JS script. Yet as I don't have an hosting for .NET and Mono is sub par, I will not develop in .NET for my hobbies web games.

yeah that is the biggest issue is finding a good host

Windows shared hosting knocks out free hosts for the most part, but from what I have seen, a Windows shared host can sometimes cost only a couple of extra bucks over a pay Linux one. They definitely aren't 5x more expensive or anything, like some people online make it sound.

I am wondering if this all would be possible under mono? So that it could be cross platform?

I have very little experience with mono my self but it would be interesting.

Well the game itself could be played on any machine regardless. Building it however would need to use mono to be cross platform

I am with Bertrand on Mono. I am not a fan. It isn't that it is incredibly different. The problem is that it is about 97% compliant. But that 3% can really cause some problems. It also floats several versions behind the official Windows releases.

Also, using Mono, you would have to get a VPS or better since you would probably have to install Mono yourself (unless there are some Mono hosts out there I am not aware of). So that would push your costs actually higher than using a Windows shared host. You may get better performance, though, since VPS > shared hosting.

A base windows hosting is pretty cheap:
http://www.lunarpages.com/hosting/web/basic/windows

Or you could also use Azure (MS own solution).

However NEVER take the mono route.... it's simply a way to kill yourself under unknown stability issues and poor performances.

I used mono for wsirc before, and it was crashing every 10 min or so. Even at work, we need to reboot all the mono systems every nights to have a somewhat stable solution and not have a process running all the time, but like starting and ending via crons. Not a good solution for me.

wow yeah the prices have come down a ton.