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Comment by angrycoder | Hacker News Reader

Funny timing.

I've been a .net developer, mostly web - some desktop, since the first release. I am currently going through the interview process with a company that focuses on rails.

Part of me is excited, I've been wanting to get away from MS technologies for a couple of years now. Part of me wonders if I am going to miss the safety net of the compiler and IDE, and if the grass truely is greener. I started out doing perl/cgi and the asp/vbscript, so it almost seems like a step backwards tool wise, but with much better languages and libraries than I had the first time around.

If anyone has any insight, it would be much apprecaited.

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I've found it to be a really great experience stepping out of a world where I felt like I was constantly re-inventing the wheel into a world where I was constantly seeing the result of a lot of eyeballs and a lot of great decisions.

Once I started relying on my tests/specs to ensure my code was working properly I started to appreciate the beauty of the code I was able to write. I also started noticing the volume of code I _didn't_ have to write.

I think you'll find it a great step forward, good luck with the job hunt!

I hear often "units test... beautiful code" and well, I agree that code can start off that way but how does this style of development/train of thought work in the long term? Are there any examples of agile software that is over 5 years old? How about 10?

I've been doing development with Rails on personal projects and while Netbeans isn't Visual Studio, it's still a pretty solid development tool.

I also dig how the local Rails environment shows you every call that's being made, plenty of solid logging integration, etc. Also the gems and other libraries being open source and freely available is great, and Ruby crushes C# with regards to Metaprogramming if you're going to go deep (which you probably will).

The debugging style is different but it's definitely several thousand leaps above ASP/VBScript. You'll be more than fine.

ASP/VBScript

Are you referring to classic ASP? VS (for .NET) has great debugging features.

I am indeed referring to classic ASP, when the poster said taking a step back I assumed he meant classic ASP over ASP.NET.

I'm sorry for that, I guess I missed out that details since the topic is about .NET.

definitely several thousand leaps above ASP/VBScript

But still, I disagree with the choice of words in your comment. I used VS Interdev for classic ASP debugging in the past, and I find it sufficient enough. Yes, I'm sure there are other IDE/tools which can do more than Interdev, but I don't think it will be several thousand leaps.

> Netbeans isn't Visual Studio

You can say that again. It's also way behind Eclipse. It's amazing how good an IDE can be when you have a large corporation behind it (I.e. MS or IBM).

Interesting... I prefer NetBeans for Java web and J2ME stuff.

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