My spare time activities include developing a multi-player web game, based on the Play-By-Mail principle (I worked in that industry full time for over two years, some twenty odd years ago). Online the principle is that turns are entered via a website, stored in a database then processed by a separate application that updates the database. The My Experience with a VPS article I penned last week is part of the same project.
The server side logic for the website is done in PHP because I'm not very keen on ASP.NET (Maybe MVC but certainly not WebForms), but it occurs to me that for as long as I'm using a Windows Server I could experiment with Phalanger especially as there is a VS2010 Addin. It's not for speed; even PHP running on .NET generates a complete web page in between 100 microseconds and 1 millisecond and that includs running queries against the database. It takes longer to compress the output and send it to the browser which then decompresses it. That takes a whole 800 milliseconds but probably it's quick because I'm only located 22 ms ping time from the server.
Phalanger looks interesting though and their website is worth checking out if you're doing things in this space. I'd mentioned Phalanger before as a technology that interested me and now I might find a use for it.
- Find this and more in the C# Code Library