Rails initial release: 2004 ASP.NET initial release: 2002

I've heard nothing but good things about RubyMine, but few people use it because a good text editor is all you need to work with most dynamic languages. C# is practically unusable without Visual Studio.

I've worked with both, give me Rails any day.

MVC released 2007/2008. WebForms has it's own purpose: RAD development in corporate environment, for vast amount of ex-VB6 devs (or any desktop RAD drag'n'drop tool). It should bring desktop devs to webs, nothing else, and its done great job. Not that I like the result, but you could build forms - heavy apps in no time! Under the WebForms and MVC is ASP.NET, and anybody could build their own web framework (and server) on top of it! Like today we have NancyFx, 6-7 years ago there was Monorail and some other MVC frameworks - but nobody used that. Because 90% of asp.net devs was exVB6 locked inside some corp building. Today, with MVC, OWIN and healthy OSS ecosystem, things are different. Even MS is supporting OWIN web middleware, which will in the end allow running web app under win/linux without any change.

xamarin studio is great to work with. Mono has a c# repl. OTOH if you said c# is practically unusable without resharper, I'd have some sympathy.

Little known fact about Xamarin Studio (MonoDevelop) is that there is a option to enable source analysis which is for some reason off by default. Flipping it on essentially enables resharper mode. Only item missing is auto namespace resolution for references.

Thanks, it's under: Preferences -> Text Editor -> Source Analysis

Rails is an actual MVC framework, ASP.NET was an over-complicated, leaky, fairly opaque abstraction for web programming. And it took years for MS to then come out with their own MVC framework.

ASP.net MVC is still ASP.net. You're probably thinking of WebForms.

Yes, ASP.NET MVC is ASP.NET, but that neither changes, nor invalidates anything that I said.

a) Rails is an actual MVC framework. b) ASP.NET was an over-complicated, leaky, fairly opaque abstraction for web programming. c) It took years for MS to then come out with their own MVC framework.

RoR vs Asp.Net is largely community (and modules) vs tools. Both are important and I am not sure if a combination of the two is even feasible. VS is like crack, it's so good, but at the same time nuget looks like a joke compared to gems. TLDR; nobody is good at everything because different things are optimized for different cases.