When to Select a Development Environment

Many developers want to be quick to select the platform upon which they will develop and implement the solution. That is, they want to start thinking about .Net, Linux, C#, or Ruby. When designing solutions, however, you should hold off on the implementation details as long as you can. Your design goal is to understand the requirements (functional and nonfunctional) fully and then to evaluate alternative solutions and implementations. If you focus too soon on platform capabilities, the platform may begin to dictate your design, not only for a specific requirement, but also for the requirements that follow.

Knowing the capabilities of a platform is important, but it is wise to hold off deciding on one until you have your requirements and potential solutions on the table.