Ruby on Rails vs. ASP.NET ​Deathmatch!!​!

nightski said:

Meh, Ruby is a nice language but RoR really doesn't excite me as much as LINQ and C# 3.0 does (ASP.NET Orcas has an OR mapper I believe also?).

Anyways, my question is what editor is he using on Mac OSX for that first tutorial?  I *love* the color scheme & fonts it uses, and would like to configure VS to look like that

cravikiran said:

Its going to have opinion and bias mixed in (plus its been a few months since I touched RoR) but heres my take :

As I learned about RoR and started doing the basic stuff thats in the Shock and Awe demos, I was like wow - this is really cool.  I have to say the MVC implementation is good.

But when I decided to try a real application, I got really frustrated by how little control I had over key areas like the SQL statements being issued.  I know I know... David says performance shouldnt be a concern, etc (I may be putting words in his mouth but thats how it stuck as to his opinion on it).  In real world apps, effective SQL and being able to cache, etc. is important.

After my run with RoR, I played around with ASP.NET 2.0.  My thought the whole time was similar ... where are the blog in 2 min (or 5 or 10 or w/e the RoR demo was) demos on this?  Cause really, its a whole lot easier with ASP.NET 2.0 than in RoR.  Its practically no code - all the controls are drag and droppable.  Now, the biggest thing is that when you want to come back and do a real app in ASP.NET 2.0 after the initial wowing, you still can!  You are the ones writing the SQL statements for the data sources (with tools to make it quick) and caching is very easy to implement.  A lot of the plumbing is there for logins, user management, site navigation, etc, etc.  And with all of it, if you need to, the provider model is easy to customize as you like.

That definitely sounds biased but thats how I honestly feel about it:  They've done good with RoR's marketing (the "demos") but beyond basics, it really disappoints.  Not so with ASP.NET 2.0 - only thing is maybe someone should do the 2-5 min "demo" for ASP.NET 2.0.

It's longer than 5 to 10 minutes, but check out this video about a Dynamic Data Website in ASP.net:

http://www.asp.net/learn/3.5-SP1/video-433.aspx

For more videos on the subject, go here: http://www.asp.net/learn/3.5-SP1/ and scroll down to the section titled "ASP.net Dynamic Data".