James Avery poses an interesting question in his "How long before ALT.NET becomes NOT.NET?" post.  I'm not really sure what it takes to get into the ALT.NET club, but from what I know I'm guessing I'd fit into the general "demographic".  Like James, I've also been wondering if and when more of the ALT.NET'ters will turn to Ruby on Rails (or alternates like Django).  I've thought about this a bit more lately since I've been spending a lot more time in Ruby and Rails.  In addition to wondering about other ALT.NET peeps, I've also thought a bit about where I want to go with my development efforts and whether I want to continue to focus on .NET as my primary means of making a living. At this point I don't see myself doing anything drastic.  Considering I only have 2 Rails projects under my belt and a heck of a lot more to learn about Ruby as well as Rails I think that's a pretty wise course to take.  I am going to continue on my path to learning Ruby as best I can, afterall it is my language for 2007.  I'm also going to continue to do projects with Rails, try and write a lot more Ruby and Rails related code from scratch (plugins make life way too easy), and evaluate if there is anything I've learned from Ruby and Rails that I can bring over into my .NET related work.  I'm also going to be keeping a close eye on IronRuby, and anxiously awaiting the day when they announce they can run Rails on top of it! 

At the end of the day, I believe learning Ruby, Rails, as well as many of the other things I'm looking into, will make me a better developer.  Whether or not I end up building the software I work on in .NET, Ruby, or Erlang doesn't matter much.  I think we all owe it to ourselves, as well as our customers, to question whether what we're using today is the best tool for the job.  We also owe it to ourselves to question whether we'd find more enjoyment in working with other languages and tools.  After all those questions are raised and answered we still need to make a decision based on where we are in life, what we have control over, and where we want to go in the future.

Perhaps before the migration to Rails starts, Microsoft will change its ways and learn a thing or two about what it takes to make ALT.NET developers happy.  Perhaps they'll realize that designers, wizards, and other magic isn't what where it's at.  Perhaps they'll realize that baking best practices into the platform is a good thing.  Perhaps they'll have a look at TextMate and realize it doesn't have any designers, yet Rails developers love it?!?!?  Perhaps they'll learn a thing or two from the success of Rails and stop the floodgates from opening.  What do you think?