This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: Anyone using the dynamic alternatives to .NET? Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

In a post acknowledging that Microsoft is moving too slowly, Robert Scoble wonders whether anyone are actually using the new rise of dynamic alternatives instead of ASP.NET.

I'm glad you asked, Scoble. We're seeing a growing influx of former .NET users coming to Rails. Allow me to sample some of their reactions as to how the two environments compare.

From Christian Romney's analysis, two choice paragraphs:

I disagree that ASP.NET is more productive than RoR. I have been FAR more productive with RoR after just a few months of learning Ruby and a few weeks of using RoR than I am with .NET even though I’ve been coding on the MS platform for 10 years, with half of that time spent almost exclusively working on web applications.

The net result is that I *don't need* an ultra-powerful IDE like VS to develop RoR apps. I do just fine with VIM, thank you. I may not have IntelliSense or Refactoring, but the time saved on DALs alone more than makes up for it, and, honestly, I refactor a lot less in Rails because everything is already in place. If someone told me I had to build a commercial ASP.NET application with VIM I'd tell them to go fly a kite.

From Tim Case's comment on a screencast thread:

10 minutes later, I couldn’t believe what I had just saw, so I started doing the Rails academy tutorials… One hour later, my jaw was on the ground as I stared at my todo application running from MySQL so I started investigating rails further… Two hours later my .NET career was over. It literally happened that afternoon. I no longer had any interest in NHibernate or even seeing Visual Studio ever again.

From Rick Olson's reply on programming hygine:

Going back to ASP.Net development makes me feel dirty. What? I have to update the stored procedure, the model, the DAL, the form, and create a new server control just to add a property???"

See more in praise section on the Rails weblog.

Scoble also highlights that we have 592 links going to rubyonrails.org from Technorati. Don't forget the 518 links going to rubyonrails.com. That's a total of 1110 inbound links (wouldn't it be nice if Technorati made it easier to get one collective list?).

That being said. If you're stuck in .NET for political reasons and not allowed to use Ruby on Rails, you should give MonoRail a look. It's developed by a guy that tasted the sweets of Rails, but was forced to use .NET at work, so he brought a numbers of the ideas over.