I have worked in numerous roles as a programmer. My lot has been everything from low level USB firmware to Visual Test to ASP and then ASP.Net. Years ago, when I first saw ASP.Net I thought that I had found the best web framework in the world. I am working on a PhD (here and there). Last semester I worked on an independent study project (scrumdidilyumptiou.us). Most of the project was done over the course of a few weeks with the bulk of the work done during a meeting at the Melon Foundation. I am a programmer you can't expect me to listen to business like presentations can you?

Because everyone else was doing it I decided I would give Ruby on Rails a shot. The hype isn't hype. It's the real thing. Two weeks ago in my spare time I started a project at www.houseplans.info. Its up and running now. Two weeks. I measure my Ruby on Rails projects in weeks not months. It is an amazing framework. Tonight I find myself writing ASP.Net code. I wish I wasn't. It is power. It can do a lot. It cannot do pretty urls. I have spent hours writing url rewrite code. This stuff takes seconds in Rails. Really - go look at map.connect in the routes.rb file. I discovered it at 2am in a hotel in New York. The next day all my urls were beautiful and user friendly. Try it with ASP.Net. You can tell me all about 'HttpContext.Current.RewritePath all you want. It doesn't work nearly as well. It is sitting in an IDE in front of me right now and I am sick of it. You can tell me that I should write an ISAPI filter. I will ask you why? Rails handles it in seconds why should I blow hours.

ASP.Net takes control. Just like Microsoft isn't free (as in beer or freedom) ASP.Net takes away your freedom. You don't get to controll where your form posts to. Your Ids are a mess of insane garbage. Pretty HTML, not just valid XHTML, but really pretty HTML is out of your reach. Just FYI for the ASP.Net team. This:

isn't pretty. Neither is this: