In which I write a few thoughts on Rails v CSharp
I originally published this on Seattle Tech Startups mailing list
- The market in Seattle is distorted with a lot more startup oriented .NET devs than you will see in just about any other city.
- When I tell people that I work on .NET startups in SF, and they are Rails devs, they look at me like I'm crazy and building my app in COBOL.NET. They still think ASP.NET == WebForms.
- BizSpark is offering effectively 3 years of free hosting to startups. This is changing the market and getting more new companies to try out .NET
- The dynamic features of the CLR / .NET still are not as useful as the dynamic features of Rails.
- ASP.NET MVC / WebAPI is on par with Rails
- Entity Framework Code First is not as good as Active Record.
- People's faith in Rails security has been shaken this year by a series of apocolyptic security flaws.
- .NET security is very good.
- The user model in rails is more extensible and well thought out than the off-the-shelf ASP.NET model.
- The rubygems ecoysystem is better than the nuget ecosystem, (and probably always will be)
- is mitigated by a lot of javascript based services that function the same way as a gem might.
- Azure no longer sucks.
- If you believe in OSS as a core part of your being, you will always feel second rate in the .NET world, compared to the Ruby world.