Trying to break free from .NET?
Posted by David November 29, 2006 @ 09:50 PM
Luckymonk escaped their .NET entanglement and found Ruby on Rails, but they still have to live in a Windows world. Now they’re putting on a workshop teaching you how to do the same. It’s in Chicago and it’s almost sold out.
Usually we don’t mention workshops any more (there are so many), but I thought it would be nice to shine some light on one of the lesser published transitions. The one from .NET to Ruby on Rails. We got plenty of stories of how PHP and Java folks are jumping ship, so its great to hear how it’s happening from the Microsoft camp too.
Glad to hear others are going down the same path. Been doing ASP.NET for 3 years and was starting to stagnate (productivity hasnt been improving as I work). Just a few months of using Rails on personal project has really transformed the way I think about writing ASP.NET at work, for the better.
Hopefully make the transition to Rails professionally eventually, but even until then theres great benefits to thinking about building web apps in a new way.
Speaking as a 5 year ASP.NET developer and Rails hobbiest: I truley believe that once Rails has good localization support and it’s performance is comparable to compiled languages.. I think we will see a massive trend of companies switching to Rails as their platform of choice.
I also think a really great feature to turn peoples heads would be for rails to stop relying on a database and be able to feed models from other resources such as web services. That way people can switch their UIs from ASP.NET to Rails without having to rewrite their BLL/DAL.
I agree with jc when he says that Rails has altered the way I write .NET applications, and in general made me a much better developer. -Tom Medhurst
I don’t think the performance has to be in the same league as compiled languages, but it will help to be as fast or faster than at least Perl and Python, something which will hopefully happen when Ruby 2.0 (which has the much faster YARV engine) is released.
Most of the time the bottlenecks are in the code and algorithms you use though, not the language/VM itself.
I’ve been doing ASP.NET for 2 years, windows development before that. My post learning rails .net code is pretty out there, but in a good way. I think rails encourages a better understanding of web architecture which when doing .net one can pretty much ignore. Its hard to believe, but when I started doing non .net I actually had to refresh myself on a lot of basic html (forms, submit buttons, etc.) that had been pretty much hidden form me in .net. I have a pretty liteweight mvc framework and prototype/scriptaculous workflow that I’d like to open source after a few more project iterations.
I left my full time .Net gig to work full time as a Ruby on Rails developer… and I’ve loved it!
But I still keep Parallels around for my .Net fix…
Btw, Eng and Cohen are cool guys…
There are currently two things I really believe in right now, SQL and Web 2.0. I Wish it included .NET but the whole process of making apps in that language is so weighed down and stagnated that it makes it hard to capitalize on the excitement of a new project. Ruby and Rails is such a refreshing change and so much more expandable and not bolted down, it’s like PHP on ACID!. Can’t wait to start ‘really’ developing with this. Brilliant work all who are involved, P.S. love the book.
There are currently two things I really believe in right now, SQL and Web 2.0. I Wish it included .NET but the whole process of making apps in that language is so weighed down and stagnated that it makes it hard to capitalize on the excitement of a new project. Ruby and Rails is such a refreshing change and so much more expandable and not bolted down, it’s like PHP on ACID!. Can’t wait to start ‘really’ developing with this. Brilliant work all who are involved, P.S. love the book.
Oh snap!
Brian and Jeff are my heroes!
W00t!
Looking forward to the Chi-town workshop. I’ve been a Microsofty for ~6 years now, but nearly every day I’m looking for ways to “sneak Rails into the system”. As jc said, it even changes the way you code .NET apps. You’ll think this is weird, but I’m actually using Ruby/ActiveRecord to generate VB.NET class files for my apps…complete with CRUD methods. It doesn’t provide the dynamic goodness of Ruby, but it’s a nice auto-generated object model for my database operations. Long live Rails!
This rocks solid!
Brain and Jeff are my heroes. W00t!
Lets vote for RoR and make it no.1 open source project here: http://www.grupthink.com/topic/821
Agree John Griffiths:”There are currently two things I really believe in right now, SQL and Web 2.0.”
It’s a playground without stored procedures support for active record, Web services (J2ee, WCF). ASP.NET really suck, because it’s ugly by design. I think .NET business layer, DAL are cool, but web layer MUST be rails based. Provide to us features above and rails will become true mainstream, I am sure.
We’re in .NET’s backyard as a Seattle company, but we went with RoR for our site www.zoodango.com. Our backgrounds are in Java, PHP, C/C++, Perl…..so basically, we’re kinda hard core, but we still really enjoyed working with Rails.