Why are ASP.NET Developers Jumping Ship?

Brendan Tompkins — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 13:25:00 GMT

James Avery talks about Pete Wright leaving Microsoft

I have a ton of respect for Pete and look forward to reading about his new experiences. I know more and more .NET developers who are playing around with RoR in their spare time, I wonder how many will convert over the next couple years?

I too wonder how many ASP.NET developers will jump ship to RoR. My interest has definitely been peaked, ever since I first saw that great Rails demo.

Other than wondering how many will defect, I also wonder why ASP.NET developers are jumping ship.. Could it be that...

VS.NET is no fun to use

Our IDE is currently in a fairly broken state (if you use VS 2005 for web development, you know what I'm talking about). I've taken to watching lots of Google Videos while I wait for builds, gets, controls to load, etc. It's impossible to get a good web development rhythm going with the IDE currently. Frankly, I think that this has been a major factor. It's not something that's easy to put your finger on, but after months and months of mild frustration with development, playing with RoR is a lot more fun than playing with a new future MS technology. Perhaps SP1 will fix this?

Everything else currently released by MS is less than thrilling

I'm talking about ASP.NET 2.0 and C# 2.0 here. With ASP.NET we've been handed a new project model with debatable benefit. At least for me and my team, it's caused more problems than it's solved. Also, there's not much new to implement in our day to day coding. Yes, we've been given some new controls, but these mostly solve problems that if you've been doing ASP.NET development for a while, you've already solved (membership, master pages, etc). So at best, a seasoned ASP.NET Developer is faced with the task of ripping out working code and replacing it. Whoohooo. Fun.

The only thing I can say that's been given to me by MS in the last two years that I really use, saves coding time, and gives me warm fuzzies about MS are C# generics.

I know there's good stuff coming

Now, I know there's good stuff on the horizon. ATLAS, WPF, WCF to name a few. Some very smart people over at CodeBetter seem to be very excited about these new things. I for one can wait. But this current state of things is giving me enough time to poke around with things like RoR. If RoR can be compelling and fun enough, it's going to grab some converts. MS better hurry up and throw us some bones.

-Brendan

Brendan Tompkins : ASP.NET, VS

Why are ASP.NET Developers Jumping Ship?