No they weren't - ASP.NET webforms and old EF was such a pile of shit it didn't matter how fast C# was (and back then it really wasn't, granted order of magnitude better than ruby/python, but way behind JVM). The applications built with it were dog slow and buggy - they couldn't even scale in enterprise setting.

Haskell, OCaml, D with great IDE support in 2006 ? Do they have that even today ?

I mean you're suggesting people use C++ for writing web apps (and c++98/03 no less !) - that's got to be facetious.

The real contender back then was PHP and Java, RoR really addressed a lot of issues from both. They both adopted the improvements brought by it since, but it took years.