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Perhaps this has changed in the last couple of years, but the last time I was in .NET land, the most glaring difference between the two was the community. Rails, being built upon a foundation of open source, instills a strong open source ethos into its community. The amount of free, permissively-licensed open source libraries available for use with Rails is staggering. Rails' entire ecosystem, down to the preferred OS kernel, is open source and free. The buy-in to work with Rails is exactly $0. This produces a community who almost rabidly shares code and knowledge as permissively as possible. Compare this to ASP.NET, where, until recently, there was a buy-in for everything, and you had to pony up a fair bit of cash just to play in the sandbox. In the ASP.NET world, everyone wants their $15 or $50 or $500 for every little bit of code or whatnot. The entire ecosystem feels like it's composed of people with an "enterprise" mindset who expect that everything should be paid for. This massively hampers growth of the technology and its community. It is directly antithetical to the open source ideals that have catapulted Rails to where it is today. Any time I had tried searching for solutions to .NET problems, they were behind paywalls, behind license restrictions, or otherwise hidden away. When I search for solutions to Rails problems, they're on StackOverflow and Github. Where is the GitHub equivalent of ASP.NET MVC projects? The OP argues that the lack of SO questions is a good thing. I'd suggest that instead, perhaps it's symptomatic of the community's attitude towards distribution of knowledge. Like I said, the last time I worked with ASP.NET was a couple of years ago, so perhaps this has changed by now, but if it has, it'd be a tectonic shift, and I'm rather doubtful that an entire ecosystem can change like that in such a relatively short amount of time. |