As I stated a couple days ago, I was planning on learning MonoRail for a very small project that I'm working on.  Due to various circumstances, I'm not going to be using MonoRail, and will instead be learning a little more Ruby on Rails.  The primary issue is that I've been having a lot of problems as well as frustrations with Parallels lately.  The  biggest frustration is that I can't seem to get going within VS.NET due to OS X having all my common keyboard shortcuts mapped to other things.  I know I could remap them, but when I'm in OS X I want them to be mapped to the things they're supposed to.  The other issue is that VS.NET is repeatedly hanging, left and right.  I'm not sure if its a Parallels issue, or a problem with having both Orcas and VS 2005 installed or something else.  What I do know is that it makes trying to get anything done very difficult.  The final issue, which may be much more my own fault than anyone elses, is that getting going with Castle proved to take longer than I anticipated.  My primary issue was in trying to get everything built from the trunk with the VS.NET wizards and such setup.  I'm still getting a compile error that's related to AL.exe which may be related to having Orcas installed side by side with 2005.

Anyway, I've decided to go with Ruby on Rails instead.  Below are some things that I think are going to be of value:

• Serving Static Content with Rails
• ActiveMerchant (with this PlugNPay Gateway patch)
• Beast (integrating with another application)
  

By the time this project is over I should have a pretty good overall feel for Rails, and will be posting my thoughts on it in comparison to my primary development platform (.NET/C#). I'm going to continue to look into getting everything going with Castle and MonoRail as well, since my initial reactions to it after going through some of the getting started material and documentation was very positive.

Regarding the Parallels issue, I think I'm going to clean things up in my virtual machine, copy them over to someplace safe on the network and go back to using BootCamp.  While Coherence and such is nice, I simply can't be productive when running the applications that are important to me (VS.NET) within Parallels.  Since Parallels supports BootCamp, perhaps I'll still use Parallels from time to time to quickly switch between XP and OS X, but for the most part I think I'll be ditching Parallels.  Heck, maybe I'll just give up Windows all together, and become a Rails developer. :)

Although I'm not finished the application that I'm building with Ruby on Rails, I've decided that next up on my plate for new'ish technology is MonoRail.  Afterall, all the cool kids who aren't quite cool enough to be doing Rails seem to be going crazy for MonoRail.  As a former web guy I've done a lot of WebForms development, so its time that I see what all the hype is surrounding MonoRail.  I was originally going to build the business/data layer with LINQ to SQL, but I think I'm instead going to go all Castle and use ActiveRecord along with Ayende's NHibernate Query Generator. 

Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to be able to figure out how the heck to get the MonoRail project templates to show up in VS.NET.  I'm guessing they're not necessary, but for a MonoRail newbie they seem like they'd be useful.  I'm planning on building things from the trunk, as such I tried following these instructions on Using the Trunk.  Can anyone offer any advice on how I might get the project templates working?  Should I give up and just go with the very old MSI that's available?

UPDATE: It helps if you actually read the documentation.  Running the RC2 installer and then following the necessary steps in Using the Trunk worked perfectly.