Let's get started

Both Ruby on Rails and Microsoft's ASP.NET are dynamic web programming frameworks. In my opinion these two languages will be the future of the net for at least the next 5-10 years. At that point we may be doing something entirely different. But at this point these are some of the most popular and powerful frameworks. As I have started to work in both languages I thought it would be good to compare and contrast the two sides of web programming, Microsoft and Open Source.

At this point I have read Microsoft Press's "ASP 2.0 step by step" and "Agile Web Development with Rails" by The Pragmatic Programmers. Both have been very interesting and beneficial to my understanding of these languages. Both of these books give you a basic understanding of the frameworks.

We'll start with the Microsoft Press book, they do a good job of covering basics. The problem is that they don't build on top of each other so you have a collection of small programs that don't relate to one another. We'll this is good for starting at different points of the book its not for someone who wants to learn from going through the entire book rather then just reference a section.

The Agile book was very well written the book starts you off with a basic tutorial and then starts of with the “Depot” application. This is the one thing that I liked about this book, you started to build something and kept adding to it. It also was well written and easy to follow. I did afterwards ad some extra features to the application but would not have needed to do so.

Welcome

Welcome to the first post of my blog! I will be trying to share things I find out about ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails along with other geeky things I find or do along the way. I hope this can help both ROR and .NET programmers find new techniques that can be used in both frameworks. While these are all personal experiences and opinions I am not an expert and welcome any feedback that you may have.

My back ground is in classic ASP VB Script, I had previously developed small applications in PHP4 and also have experience in Java, C++, and Intel based assembly language using the MASM compiler (yuck) and now venturing in to Rails and .Net