I can't help but think that the interest in Rails is not so much because of Rails doing things well, but because of .NET doing things badly. Look at the amount of code written in a typical .NET app - screeds of stored procs, extensive (often hand-written) data access code, etc.

Rails has taken a some productivity-boosting patterns and packaged them in an accessible way. Yes, there are some constraints on implementing similar patterns in a statically-typed language, but often too much is made of those contraints. I strongly believe that .NET development can be done much better, much smarter, and much more efficiently than it is commonly done today. IMHO .NET development should be almost as concise as Rails and yet _more_ poweful.

I think its far more a question of frameworks and philosophies, rather than the underlying language.

I agree 100%! While there are certain things within Rails (provided by way of Ruby) that aren't possible at the moment in .NET, I think you are absolutely correct that much of the mystical powers that people see in Rails could be brought into a framework in the .NET world. SubSonic and ActiveRecord/MonoRail are two such projects that I believe have that goal in mind.

http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=actionpack
http://www.castleproject.org/

I just answered another post you had on your site, but this one struck home as well. The ASP.Net project I referred to there is actually using MonoRails. We credit that choice to letting us make the great progress that we have. Between the architecture it gives you and the ActiveRecord implementation it is built on, we didn't have to code a bunch of the plumbing stuff you ordinarily might.

We're big fans of MonoRails :)

bab

Brian, Thanks for the thoughts. I've been curious what kind of success people have been having with MonoRail, so its good to hear from someone who's using it with success. As you say, the plumbing that it and ActiveRecord provide is what appeals to me the most. Since I'm not currently doing much web work I haven't gotten a chance to give MonoRail a spin, but I'm looking forward to finding some time to kick it's tires.