ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate

It is fast, but I have a couple of problems:

1. A technical bug - EF often fails to update SQL Server DB on model change (RecreateDatabaseIfModelChanges).

2. More general - the generated UI is completely data centric, while even MS people advocate for business centric, task based UIs.

Just to offer a different road, you could do something like that with the previous version of MVC + Fluent NHibernate with automapping and schema_update, if I'm not mistaken :)

I think you shouldn't over-think the question. If you already know C# but are new to Ruby/Django/PHP, it's probably better to go with ASP.NET. I personally go with ASP.NET for the intellisense and refactoring support of Visual Studio. The main drawbacks for me are that deployment is more difficult and expensive than other frameworks.

If only I could just "azure push"...

When you work for a company that already runs on MS infrastructure. Jeff Atwood of StackOverflow also claims that they have much lower server requirements because C# inherently runs faster than non-compiled languages such as ruby/python/php, but of course there is some debate about whether that balances out the higher cost of IIS/SQLServer licenses.

I'm not an expert in ASP.NET MVC and I'm not a hater either -- but it doesn't seem to offer anything that Rails doesn't (other than aforementioned runs-on-MS-stack and compiled language). Would love to hear other opinions from people with more .Net MVC experience, though.

That's a pretty fair question. In my opinion, the only reason to go with ASP.NET anything is if you already know C# (or any other .Net language).

Otherwise, Rails, Django, Flask, Cake, etc are going to be significantly easier to get up to speed with, have better communities, have less murky IP situations and are generally going to be less expensive to develop for and to hire developers for.

There are advantages to the CLR world - Tooling is top notch (Mono's tools are lacking right now but seem to be improving quickly), there is a reasonable amount of documentation, even though some of it is of questionable quality. C# performs well, both on Mono and .Net. There are many libraries available (although the quality of the libraries can sometimes be lacking). Many of the higher quality libraries are closed-source commercial libraries. Some of the worst ones are also closed-source commercial packages, so it pays to do research prior to purchasing anything.

The community has been warming to open source - in my opinion this is largely due to the efforts of Miguel de Icaza and everyone working on the Mono Project. (As an aside, if you don't like asp but you do like C#, you should consider checking out and contributing to Manos de Mono, a Mono based web framework which is still in its infancy - https://github.com/jacksonh/manos .)

Microsoft is, and always will be a for-profit company that makes money from selling its software. It has a vested interest in creating platform lock-in, but developers don't have to stick to the Microsoft way of doing things if they choose not to, thanks to the strength of Mono today. Either way, Microsoft is pretty up-front about what the cost of doing business is with them; and they have proven to be pretty consistent with their pricing.

Politics and profits aside, C# is an enjoyable language to use. I haven't spent time with F# yet, but I understand it's quite enjoyable as well. The C# team has done an excellent job of paying attention to programming trends and adopting techniques from other languages. The transition from 1.1 to 2.0 was kind of clunky, but since then they've shown a great deal of good taste in what they've implemented as well as how it's been implemented. Of course, the downside is that C# is a large and complex language. I think the most recent "C# in Nutshell" book is well over a thousand pages.

I have production code deployed in Python, PHP and Clojure, but I'm currently migrating back to .Net for my personal projects. C# developers get an excellent cross-platform deployment story thanks to Mono (MonoTouch, MonoDroid, MonoMac). Honestly, I think Mono runs on pretty much everything from PC, Mac & Linux to WP7, iPhone and Android; as well as game consoles, embedded hardware, etc.

Additionally, many of the new to .Net technologies coming out of Microsoft right now such as F#, C# 5's async framework, MVC3 and Entity Framework 4 are very compelling. Microsoft is kind of a dorky company, but in my opinion they are producing pretty good software right now.

The mvc team is a breath of fresh air, no question. But I'm surprised to hear someone who knows RoR say that they are "pretty close".

There's more to dynamic programming than the dynamic keyword. I don't want to get into which is better, but to say that C# is even in the same league as Ruby for dynamic programming, because of the dynamic keyword, is wrong - if for no other reason that properties from anonymous types (which dynamics are built on top of) are internal. Read meta programming Ruby, or try doing extensive [tb]dd with both, and you'll see how different they are (hint, you don't need DI frameworks in Ruby).

Ruby gems has a rich history, a strong community, and a proven track record. Every ruby developer has, and uses gems. Most packages are in known repositories. Gems has been extended to solve other problems (bundler). NuGet is a good and necessary start, but, again where you say "pretty close", I'd say "pretty far".

I know! They iterate pretty fast. I love it but it's hard to keep up

Other than Razor (which is optional), not that much has changed and it is a pretty painless upgrade. Under the old way they used to version software, this is really more like ASP.NET MVC 1.5 SP1

Spare a thought for those of us who have to maintain ASP.NET 2.0 Web Forms apps for a living.

I'm using an F# domain model assembly. A problem is that MVC's model binding infrastructure assumes model types with mutable properties (I had to write custom model binders to get around this).