This week was my second week working on a Ruby on Rails project. Even though I am thoroughly enjoying Ruby on Rails (more on this later), I’m not going to use this as an excuse to blast .NET, the .NET community, and anyone else associated with .NET.

I really don’t see how posts like this one do any good at all. You may be tired of Microsoft’s stance on things, and you might be tired of working with people who don’t share your values, and that’s legitimate. You may want to work on a platform like Ruby on Rails that you feel is going to make you more successful. But that doesn’t mean that you should go out in a blaze of glory and tear down everyone and anyone associated with .NET.

If you don’t like .NET, you have two choices, you can change your platform (i.e. switch to something like Ruby) or change your platform (i.e. make the .NET world better). There are a lot of people doing the latter, and to slam the entire .NET culture does these people a big disservice. I am very thankful for these people because they are making the .NET platform much better, and I’ve reaped the benefits of this over the years.

This post was initially prompted by this tweet from Jeremy Miller:

I don’t think there’s anybody more self-righteous and condescending than a .Net turned Ruby developer.

Seeing that 27 people have retweeted that, that tells me that he’s not the only one who is hurt by all of the anti-.NET sentiment.

A lot of people in the .NET community don’t agree with how Microsoft does things and what they stand for, and I fall within that group. I would rather see Microsoft spend less time on things like Microsoft.Data and LightSwitch and spend more time promoting good developer practices (like TDD), helping to create some kind of .NET package management system (like Ruby’s gems), SQL migrations (like Ruby’s rake), and the like. If you want to blast Microsoft for stuff like this, be my guest. They’re a for profit company, so they can act like big boys and take the criticism. But please don’t aim that venom at all of the good people in the .NET community who are spending a lot of their free time to make the .NET platform better.

My current assignment is wrapping up this week and next week I will be joining a team doing Ruby on Rails development. I’m really excited about this for several reasons:

• I want to see if Ruby on Rails really helps me get things done easier and faster, as I suspect it will.
• I’m anxious to learn more about doing things the Ruby Way.
• I know half of the team and I like them, so that has to count for something!

The project I’ll be working on is a large application that has been around since 2006, so it’ll be a good example of a mature RoR application. It will be interesting to see how dealing with a mature RoR application compares to dealing with a mature .NET application.

Don’t worry, I am not forsaking my .NET roots! I’m looking forward to my Ruby on Rails experience and I’ll most likely be blogging about life as a .NET developer in a Ruby world.

The whole debate that I had the other day about .NET developers learning Ruby on Rails stemmed from an earlier conversation about how much more productive you can be in Ruby on Rails vs. Java or .NET. Based on what I keep hearing, I think it’s really hard to ignore Ruby on Rails.

Just to be clear, I have learned Ruby on Rails by playing around with it on side projects, but I haven’t done any big real world apps in it yet. But I have too much evidence in favor of Ruby on Rails.

• People I respect telling me that they estimate that they get things done 4x faster in Ruby on Rails.
• Numerous blog posts (which unfortunately I didn’t bookmark) of .NET devs who took the plunge, decided to do a project in Ruby on Rails instead of .NET, and finished earlier than they would’ve with .NET, even with the learning curve of learning something new.
• A large company had a team that wanted to use RoR for a project, but the company is largely a Java shop and told them no. The team went and did it anyway and 4 months later they were done. The higher-ups were mad and sat down and estimated how long it would take to rewrite it in Java and estimated it at 18 months.

If I were hearing this from just a couple people, I could discount it as fanboyism, exaggeration, or whatever. But I’m hearing too much of this sort of thing.

Just imagine if you could cut the cost of software development to 25% of its current cost. Think of how much money your IT department can save. Think of how much more you could accomplish each year.

Sadly, it seems that very few companies are adopting Ruby on Rails. Maybe they aren’t hearing these anecdotes, or maybe they’re dismissing it as fanboyism and exaggeration. Or maybe they feel that their current IT staff wouldn’t be capable of succeeding or that they won’t want to learn a new language and a new way of doing things.

If we were talking about a slight improvement in productivity, you could easily say that you’re sticking with .NET or Java or whatever because that’s what your team knows well, and I might say that you have a valid argument. But a 4x productivity gain? How can you ignore that? Even if my numbers are exaggerated and it’s only a 2x productivity gain, how could you ignore that?

I hope that IT departments really get serious about this, because a company could have a huge advantage if they were able to complete 4x the work each year. Personally, I really hope to use Ruby on Rails sometime myself because I want to do things this fast. I remember when I first started doing ASP.NET MVC and I cut my usual estimates in half and how awesome that felt. If there is a better and faster way to do something, then count me in.

We had a lively twitter discussion today about whether learning Ruby on Rails is something that would be worth it for the average .NET developer and if the supposed productivity gains that people say that they’re getting from Ruby on Rails only come from the “smart people”. While this is a valid question, I think there is a bigger issue at hand.

The real question is whether the so-called “average” .NET developers are capable of learning new concepts. Certainly the “smarter” developers may learn faster, but I think it’s unfair to say that you have to be “really smart” in order to do good work and learn new things.

A similar argument that I’ve heard in the past is that we should not use certain tools or concepts like dependency injection or unit testing because it will be hard to find developers that understand these concepts or it will be difficult for people to learn them. I’m all for keeping things as simple as possible and not adding unneeded complexity, but if I’m tasked with completing a project, I’m going to use the best tools that I can to get the job done as fast as possible with the highest level of quality.

I think the heart of the matter comes down to expectations. If we tell “average” developers that learning Ruby on Rails or test-driven development is too hard or only for smarter people, then we’re expecting (and in a way, encouraging) them to be mediocre. I expect a lot from the people I work with. I expect them to want to do the best job that they can, create well designed code, write tests, complete tasks quickly, and not write bugs. Is that realistic? Well, not exactly (we’re not perfect, so we will make mistakes), but there’s no point in striving for anything less than the best.

I also expect that if you’re in this business, you’re always going to be having to learn new things. Most developers are good at lots of different advanced concepts, like how to optimize SQL queries, how CSS works, how .NET garbage collection works, and things like that. At one point, these people didn’t know or understand these concepts, but they learned and now they’re pretty good at it. Most developers with 5 years of experience will be experts at something.

The real problem is when people do not want to learn. Like I said, I think almost all developers are capable of learning and understanding advanced programming concepts. People are always finding better ways to develop software, so I would expect that I’m always going to have to be learning these new ways so that I can be as productive as I can be. I think we need to encourage and reward learning.

When it comes to Ruby on Rails, I think that if you want to succeed at Ruby, you will need to write tests. In .NET you have the compiler, so people feel like they can not write tests and get by just fine, and to some extent this works (although I personally would not recommend it). In Ruby, you are much more likely to get burned by not writing tests. But if you can learn TDD and Ruby and become a much more productive developer and write better code, isn’t it worth the effort in the long run?

Now if you want to see a productivity hit, take a Ruby on Rails developer and have him do WebForms.

I finally broke down, set aside some time, and learned Ruby on Rails. My previous experience had been the Ruby Koans, random discussions with people, and a couple quick demos. So basically I knew Ruby, but not Rails.

I started by reading through Rails For .NET Developers, which was an excellent book. Normally I don’t read a lot of tech books (I’m more of a blog guy), but when I’m learning something new, I like having something that will walk me through it. This book did an excellent job of it.

So I had a basic web site with a couple pages and I started building it. I used RSpec for my testing framework and I wrote my tests first, of course.

I was surprised at how similar Rails development is to ASP.NET MVC. Certainly the language is different, but you’re using the same MVC pattern, you’re writing tests for the same things, and you’re creating views in pretty much the same way. I knew that the .NET community had borrowed a lot from Rails, but I got a first hand view of it. I was glad to know that my world wasn’t going to be turned upside down.

The main thing that I noticed is that with Ruby on Rails, it’s really easy to hit the ground running. You have most of what you need out of the box with Rails, and you can easily install more gems to provide extra functionality. It’s all so easy and there is very little friction.

I’ve been doing .NET for awhile now, and I feel that I have a pretty good understanding of it. I’ve learned a lot of tricks and I use a lot of open source projects and other Microsoft libraries to add functionality to .NET, similar to how you add gems in Rails. I written code myself that does database migrations (like rake db:migrate) and code that runs builds (like rake… I’ve even used rake in .NET). But there several significant differences — first, I had to know about the open source projects (and I suspect that many people don’t know about some of them, or worse, aren’t allowed to use them). Second, I have to download them and set them up myself (and know how to do it). Third, I had to write some of the code from scratch.

I think the point I’m trying to make in that last paragraph is that someone who is new to .NET could not grab ASP.NET MVC and have everything they need to create a really good, frictionless, ASP.NET MVC app. When I did my Rails app, I already had my ORM, database migrations, build runner, and my project structure was set up with a lot of code generated for me.

The other benefit to this is that most Rails developers will most likely be doing things the same way. If you do Rails, you’re going to be using an MVC framework, you’re going to use ActiveRecord as your ORM, you’re going to use rake, you’re going to have the same project structure, and on and on. In the .NET world, there are so many different solutions out there. Not that they are all bad, but consistency makes it easier to find someone else who does things your way. In the .NET world, a large majority of developers are still using stored procedures to do all of their data access, and if you are using an ORM, there are many different ones that you might be using. Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (although I would argue that hand rolled data access layers using stored procs are a bad thing), but I feel like there is value in consistency.

I feel that Rails development is very tempting to many developers in the .NET community. This isn’t all because of the language, it’s also because ideas and practices like TDD, the MVC pattern, and good design practices are much more widely accepted in the Ruby community. There is a lot of good in the .NET community, and I still think that .NET is a great platform for building all kinds of applications. But I feel like things like TDD, ORMs, the SOLID principles, etc. are used by less then half of .NET developers out there. Once you start using things like ORMs and TDD, it’s really difficult to join a project that doesn’t use these things and be productive.

So the moral of the story is to use whatever tool you can find to best do the job. Ruby on Rails is something I wouldn’t mind having in my toolbox.