We are a team of about 15 employees, in a non-IT enterprise. Today, we mainly develop websites, using PHP, MySQL, etc. We run a bit less than 100 linux servers on ourselves.But today, we are confronted with a too-big-for-us-to-code project. We selected a great provider (yes, outsourcing), and now they ask us to choose between C++/Qt and .NET/WPF.The app is highly graphical, and meant to be distributed on Windows systems. .NET is recommanded to us as easier to design and more lightweight.But what about our team ? Can we handle, with our small number, both universes at the same time ?responsibilites :during the dev : design the app, review the codeafter the dev : host servers, do maintenance and answer user callsin the case we need a v2, we intend to call back the same providerWhat do you think ?EDITWe finally chose C++/Qt. The reasons are :the dev time has been tested to be somewhat equalit suits us better from a management point of viewand it increases cross-platform portability
Can a small team enter .NET world while most of them are working on OpenSource languages?
team;organization;wpf;qt
I'll go the other direction on this one: if your team has linux experience and familiarity, and you run your own servers, outsourcing to a .NET shop will be a disaster.  You won't have the experience to rein in the outsourcers when they get crazy, your linux and PHP intuitions will fail you in the Windows environment, you won't easily spot goofy .NET constructs, and you'll curse the fates that bind you to supporting two sets of servers, one Linux, one Windows.  If you hire some Windows folks to support that set of servers, the culture clashes and arguments will astonish you. 