Why Ruby on Rails is better than .NET

For the past four days at work I've been assigned to apply a redesign to an older .NET site that we did a couple of years ago. It has been infuriatingly frustrating trying to apply a CSS-based design to a table-based .NET site. The way .NET handles almost everything is so convoluted and esoteric that it took me a full day just to get the hang of how it handled displaying markup.

And what is the deal with the datagrid?!?! It's great on paper, but crap in practice. Just the datagrid definition spanned five lines. Using the AlternatingItemStyle tag to get alternating styles for the table rows is ok, but Rails makes it SOOOO much easier with the cycle method. And speaking of styles, the datagrid has to have each style that you'd like applied declared seperately which makes for the huge datagrid definition. Also, take a look at the HTML that a datagrid produces. You'll be surprised at how much markup it can create for a simple <td>.

Now, don't get me wrong. I can see where .NET would be useful and I'm sure there are a ton of examples where it would make much more sense to use .NET than Rails. I think my biggest problem is that I know almost nothing about .NET. I can get by with making visual changes, but I stay far away from the codebehinds.

Closing thoughts: give Ruby on Rails a try! You might just like it!

Tagged: rails

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