ASP.NET 2.0 vs Ruby On Rails

Ruby
1

Hi,

I’ve spent the past few weeks desperately looking for good comparisons
on ASP.NET 2.0 vs Ruby on Rails.

At the moment I’m considering migrating from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET
2.0. I’m excited about ASP.NET 2.0 and it’s new features but… I’m
also aware of the rediculous development time spent on an average
website.

So I’m wondering if my time an investement is better spent on RoR than
on ASP.NET 2.0. VS2005 is a wonderful IDE but C# is perhaps too
elaborate for speedy development.

Can anyone give me real life experiences on switching from ASP.NET to
RoR development? Is it really as good as the hype says it is? Is it
worthy of a long-term investment in time and money?

I really want to get to the bottom of this. I’ve been advocating
ASP.NET for a long time but now I’m having doubts about it. Maybe RoR
is the way to go?

Thanks,

Moni

2

First, you’d probably get better response from the Rails list.

Given that, I’ll tell you my experience. I’ve had a custom software
development shop doing .NET work since the betas, so I’m pretty
familiar with that platform. I’ve only begun to get involved with
Rails in the past months. Given that and what I see from ASP.NET 2.0,
my experience is that if you’re given a choice, choose Rails.

.NET 2.0 does have a lot of compelling features, and the IDE is
without a doubt the best there is. Still, all of that comes at a
cost, and at the end of the day you’re going to be far more productive
in Rails than on a .NET platform. The elegance and productivity
achievable in Rails is due in large part from the Ruby language.
You’re not going to be able to adequately duplicate that in another
environment like .NET.

Every day that I work with .NET is generally a day spent in a lot of
frustration. I spend a good amount of time fighting against some of
the “cool” features of the language and the IDE. Microsoft sells the
“drag-and-drop” features of the platform, but noone (i know anyway)
writes applications that way. At least not on an enterprise level.

On the hand, right now Rails may or may not be a hard sell, if you’re
in some kind of position of selling your services. The corporate
world, at least where I live and work, has just recently (in the last
two years) begun to embrace .NET wholeheartedly. They’ve invested
significant resources in training, platform changes, etc…, mostly
switching from Java or VS 6, and are going to be reluctant to make
another shift so quickly. That doesn’t mean it will not happen, and
it means that if you go the Rails route, you’re going to be well
positioned.

Good luck.

Michael

3

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 04:43:37PM +0900, Moni wrote:
} I’ve spent the past few weeks desperately looking for good comparisons
} on ASP.NET 2.0 vs Ruby on Rails.
[…]

I know of none. I don’t think it’s likely that a good one will be
forthcoming. To truly understand the value of either one requires using
it
to attack a significant problem. In the time it would take to complete
such
a project in one, there would be a newer version of the other. It would
be
extremely difficult to get an in-depth, apples-to-apples comparison.

I think the best you can hope for is either a comparison of a cursory
understanding of one against a deep understanding of the other or a
comparison of an old version of one against the current version of the
other.

} So I’m wondering if my time an investement is better spent on RoR than
} on ASP.NET 2.0. VS2005 is a wonderful IDE but C# is perhaps too
} elaborate for speedy development.

What you’ve said here is largely meaningless without a goal in mind. Are
you aiming for employability? Learn and use ASP.NET. Are you working on
personal projects? Learn and use whichever is most comfortable. Are you
planning a startup? Learn and use Rails (you will be able to attract
brighter people to work with you, thus improving the odds of your
startup’s
success).

} Can anyone give me real life experiences on switching from ASP.NET to
} RoR development? Is it really as good as the hype says it is? Is it
} worthy of a long-term investment in time and money?

As above, it depends on your goals.

} I really want to get to the bottom of this. I’ve been advocating
} ASP.NET for a long time but now I’m having doubts about it. Maybe RoR
} is the way to go?

Rails is a tool that is great for certain kinds of things. The same
applies
to ASP.NET. Rails works very well for standalone webapps. It does not
work
nearly as well as an interface to data shared by multiple applications.
In
particular, ActiveRecord (the ORM component of Rails) does not deal with
stored procedures and expects some fairly strict naming conventions in
the
database.

For rapid development of a standalone web application, nothing beats
Rails.
Its AJAX support is also quite good, though Microsoft’s Atlas may wind
up
being just as good if not better. Its test-driven development support is
another major benefit. Finally, the fact that there are no software
licensing costs involved in deploying it (i.e. it is itself free
software
and can be used on a stack of free software, including the operating
system
and RBMS) can be an advantage in many environments.

I’ve used ASP.NET 1.1 and I’ve used Rails. Of the two, I think ASP.NET
is a
good tool for a broader problem domain than Rails. That doesn’t mean
that
ASP.NET is better than Rails, it means that I think it is better for
more
purposes than Rails is. It emphatically does not mean that I don’t
consider
them both valuable and worth knowing, nor does it mean that I will
refuse
to use one or the other. Furthermore, I am in favor of (and may
contribute
to) increasing the problem domain for which Rails is a good tool.

} Thanks,
} Moni
–Greg

4

“Moni” [email protected] writes:

Can anyone give me real life experiences on switching from ASP.NET to
RoR development? Is it really as good as the hype says it is? Is it
worthy of a long-term investment in time and money?

Take a look at the posts of this blog - http://www.softiesonrails.com/

5

Michael T. wrote:

Every day that I work with .NET is generally a day spent in a lot of
frustration. I spend a good amount of time fighting against some of
the “cool” features of the language and the IDE. Microsoft sells the
“drag-and-drop” features of the platform, but noone (i know anyway)

There’s no such word as ‘noone’. Instead, ‘no one’, ‘nobody’, or
‘none’ could be used. A poetic example:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.

6

On Mar 1, 2006, at 4:51 AM, Michael T. wrote:

cost, and at the end of the day you’re going to be far more productive
in Rails than on a .NET platform. The elegance and productivity
achievable in Rails is due in large part from the Ruby language.
You’re not going to be able to adequately duplicate that in another
environment like .NET.

You’ve got to be kidding about VS.NET being the best IDE there is
(unless you mean for .NET development)!

Every day that I work with .NET is generally a day spent in a lot of
frustration. I spend a good amount of time fighting against some of
the “cool” features of the language and the IDE. Microsoft sells the
“drag-and-drop” features of the platform, but noone (i know anyway)
writes applications that way. At least not on an enterprise level.

So maybe you were kidding. :wink:

Everyone I know who has experience in multiple environments with
multiple tools has said VS.NET is far from the best IDE there is, and
I agree more each day I use it. (I really miss IDEA [http://
www.jetbrains.com]). On the contrary, I haven’t heard or read about
such experiences working with Ruby on Rails. (Maybe I should follow
the Rails list closer, though). Strongly consider Rails.

Craig

7

On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 01:47:51PM +0900, Craig D. wrote:
[…]
} You’ve got to be kidding about VS.NET being the best IDE there is
} (unless you mean for .NET development)!
[…]
} Everyone I know who has experience in multiple environments with
} multiple tools has said VS.NET is far from the best IDE there is, and
} I agree more each day I use it. (I really miss IDEA [http://
} www.jetbrains.com]). On the contrary, I haven’t heard or read about
} such experiences working with Ruby on Rails. (Maybe I should follow
} the Rails list closer, though). Strongly consider Rails.

I can’t say I’ve tried every IDE out there, but I’ve tried a lot of
them.
VS.NET is the only IDE I’ve ever used that I consider an improvement
over
vim, make, and a commandline debugger. It isn’t much of an improvement
over
make, and I’d really like vim keybindings, but intellisense genuinely
increases my efficiency as a programmer. Also, its debugger is second to
none.

Yes, VS.NET is for .NET development. I know of no IDE that is not
targetted
at a particular development platform, and .NET is its target platform. I
know, I know, Eclipse can be used for all sorts of languages. Great.
It’s
targetted at Java development, and while it may have plugins for other
platforms it remains primarily for Java development.

Also, I’ve suffered a variety of frustrations with VS.NET, and I
wouldn’t
dream of calling it bug-free. I have high hopes that VS.NET 2005 is
better,
but 2003 has failed me a number of times in a number of ways. Then
again,
so has every piece of software I’ve ever used, including Linux, vim,
bash,
PuTTy, xchat, gaim, KDE, GNOME, even xterm. What I can say in favor of
VS.NET is what I said in the first paragraph: it’s the only IDE I’ve
ever
preferred to my trusty text editor, commandline build system, and
commandline debugger.

} Craig
–Greg

8

I happen to be the lucky (or unlucky depending POV) reviewer of one

2.0 book soon to come out by Manning. I can say with my experiences in
doing
exercises and also having built one full-working .NET web-application
that
the choice comes down to comfort level, scalability and the number of
people
involved. RoR has a learning curve, learning ruby. ASP has a learning
curve
also, yet you seem to already use it. RoR’s ActiveRecord and MVC design
make
doing things in a fast-organized way fairly efficient.

The new features in ASP 2.0 though do have their merits. Both systems
offer
Object oriented approaches. The Visual Studio IDE is also a very
compelling
selling point for those who feel they work most efficiently in a very
elaborate IDE. I was surprised at times how easy some things were to do.
I
do notice a lot of websites touting the easy drag-and-drop or
cut-and-paste
ASP solutions are not very efficient however.

Rails is robust and fast for development. I basically mean that it’s
easy to
get projects from nowhere to someplace quickly and without the hassle of
fighting the language. The real roadblock like I mentioned, is learning
the
ruby language. If you’re already cozy with ASP, decide what it is that
frustrates you the most about it and see how little frustration you
experience doing the identical tasks using RoR. And, like previously
mentioned, this would be better suited for the RoR mailing list.

Best Regards

9

William J. wrote:

Michael T. wrote:

There’s no such word as ‘noone’. Instead, ‘no one’, ‘nobody’, or
‘none’ could be used. A poetic example:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.

Yet another poetic example:

noone can quite begin to guess

e.e.cummings in “i love you much(most beautiful darling)”

He used the expression ‘noone’ in a lot of places, this is just one
example… :slight_smile: IIRC there are also references to ‘noone’ in 6
nonlectures as well.

ciao,
furlan

–

“I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very
reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment.” – Gotama Buddha

10

Paul B. wrote:

It sure is, I was just being lazy and did know of the reference. I
also, alas, did not include spaces in the correct places in the name
either.

Cummings is one of my favorite poets.

–

“I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very
reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment.” – Gotama Buddha

11

On 03/03/06, fprimus [email protected] wrote:

e.e.cummings in “i love you much(most beautiful darling)”

http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/caps.htm

Isn’t pedantry fun?! :wink:

Paul.