As a C++ and .NET developer for most of my career, some people found it odd that I would switch up and jump on the Ruby on Rails bandwagon this late in the game. I had fallen in love with ASP.NET MVC because the true simplicity of its web development, and while I found some of the quirks of Ruby and Rails initially annoying, I’m now a true believer in Rails and what it can do.

You’re probably thinking that this is just another post of how great rails is and how you should come over to our side because we have cookies. I’m trying to write this as an objective view of Rails from a .NET developer’s perspective, so hopefully this won’t come off as fanboyism speak.

I have been writing code in C# since v1.1 and the language itself has come into being my personal favorite of the many I’ve used in the past. It has near native speed, fast compilation, and a fairly straight forward syntax. But it also includes a vast framework which now includes ASP.NET MVC. Although ASP.NET MVC isn’t the first MVC framework, even for .NET, it’s tooling support in Visual Studio and simplicity has made it the fastest growing in the .NET world.

Ruby on Rails on the other hand is fairly new to me. I’ve been coding in it for about a year between versions 2.1 and now 3.1. While it’s new to me, I’ve found myself building web applications quicker and cleaner with it.

Works in Notepad

I use notepad as an example here although I use vim. What I’m really saying here is the framework is easy enough that you don’t need an IDE, IntelliSense, or even documentation up if you are familiar with the framework. This is not so true with ASP.NET MVC due to the complexity of the .NET framework and the amount of generated code.

Quick Dev Time

My time is so precious, I didn’t even have enough time to write “development” in the header. Okay, so that’s not true at all, but I’ve noticed Rails to be quicker in development even though I’m an average ruby programmer and pretty fluent in C#. This mostly comes down to the simplicity of the framework and the minimal amount of physical typing that’s required.

ASP.NET MVC has improved greatly to reduce the amount of code that’s required to build an application, but it still has a way to go. Ruby may have the advantage here because it’s a dynamic language and simpler to add duck typing. While .NET supports multiple dynamic languages, it still has to limit itself to the lowest common denominator with static objects with some dynamic thrown in.

Also, while ASP.NET MVC 2 and 3 are pushing hard for the user to run with ADO.NET Entity Framework, it still doesn’t make a default choice for the developer. While this shows the framework is open to choice, it makes initial development one step more difficult.

Gems

If there was one thing that should make anyone look another time at Ruby on Rails, it’s the huge number of ruby gems available. Microsoft has had a good push lately with their NuGet packages and the market has seen a quick explosion of popularity, but it’s still hard to browse for packages unless you know them before hand. Mostly this is because there seems to be less discussions on popular NuGet packages on the Internet. I’m hoping that the tooling in Visual Studio 11 fixes some of that and people talk more about their favorite NuGet packages.

On the other hand, I know that in a new Rails application, I’m going to pull in Devise (authentication), CanCan (authorization), Haml (view renderer), RSpec (testing), and Will Paginate (pagination). With these, I’ve gotten at least a weeks worth of work, if not more, compared to having to build some of those by hand in ASP.NET MVC. It’s a nice feeling to know you won’t have to write yet another pagination partial.

Tools

Okay, this one I know is going to be widely controversial. Visual Studio is by far the best IDE built. Period. End of story. If you use even 10% of the features it has, you will have to agree with me. However, I now work almost exclusively with Macs and Linux machines. This means I cannot use visual studio.

We have a pretty good alternative with MonoDevelop which I use quite often now, but the tooling for MVC within it is mediocre at best and only really supports V1 and some parts of V2 of the MVC framework.

The Rails community follows more along the lines of the Linux and Unix mentality of having tools do one thing and do them well. With the fact that everything runs separately, I can have a script run things automatically for me. This is exactly what I do with Guard which runs my unit tests automatically every time I save. It also alerts me on success or failure using Growl so I don’t have to interrupt what I’m doing.

ASP.NET MVC Not a Bad Choice

If you’re a .NET developer, this is not going to change your mind. ASP.NET MVC is still a solid choice, especially if you have existing .NET code you need to interact with. Microsoft, in a short period of time, has built up a great framework that competes with Ruby on Rails and Django. This hopefully opens your mind a little to the other options that may exist.