To each his own. I develop on windows, but am not a fan of VS. Tried, it didn't work out.

Are you going to deploy Django on Windows? You would not be wise to do so. So why choose such a profoundly different development environment?

I have successfully deployed Django on Windows[1] systems for critical intranet apps and have at least two more Django on Windows projects in the pipes.

No it is not an ideal platform but sometimes factors outside your control make it the best/only option if you want to use Django/Python. I work in a largeish very Microsoft dependent hospital and getting infrastructure support (hardware, database backups etc) from the IT department requires a Microsoft stack.

Being able to deploy a Django project on either Linux or Windows systems from a single code base is a pretty big advantage for me.

[1] Windows Server 2008R2 / MSSQL

Deploying Django to Windows is exactly what this article is demonstrating. Care to explain why we would not be wise to do so?

Kind of taking some liberties with the definition of the world 'profoundly', aren't you?

If someone works quicker and better in a given dev environment, power to 'em.

I don't think "profoundly different" is an overstatement when comparing Windows to anything Linuxy.

If someone works quite a bit better in Windows, OK... but I think it's a far better idea to mirror your deployment environment as closely as possible, not just in staging/testing, but on your development machine as well.

That's not always practical, but working in an environment you should know doesn't even vaguely approximate any deployment scenario means you will miss any platform-specific issue that would have been obvious if you were staying closer to your deployment platform. At best it will be found during testing/staging or by another dev who's using a more appropriate environment, but that's several extra steps and extra time that wouldn't have otherwise been necessary.

I'd want to add that working in a windows for dev, linux for deploy environment will eventually make you constrain yourself to using libraries which work on both platforms.

Which, unfortunately, is a big gap in Python. We had this developer using Windows who wouldn't want to install Visual Studio. So we tried finding binaries for stuff like LXML, and the newest versions we could find where a good two or three years old. Eventually we hit a wall with one of the packages (I can't recall exactly which one, but one related to cryptography I think.) We couldn't find a binary, and installing Visual Studio + configuring to work from the command line, etc. took way more time than setting up VirtualBox with an Ubuntu machine.

A massive waste of time.

I agree that the whole situation with C based python packages on Windows is really quite broken, but until they get around to actually fixing the situation every python programmer who has to touch windows should have http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ bookmarked.

Even on OS X, it's a total waste of time to not use a VirtualBox that mimics your production machine.

> Are you going to deploy Django on Windows? You would not be wise to do so.

Is there something about Python on Windows that isn't stable or are there specific package/modules that Django requires that have issues?

Why not? It works perfectly well. I've also in the past run PHP sites on Windows (behind both Apache and IIS) for real world applications too. There's too much hivemind about these things. If it works for you, then it works.

You could mount a remote Linux box over SSH using something like ExpanDrive and edit in VS, right? (analogous to sshfs) Not sure why you'd want to do so, but I guess VS does have effective autocomplete.