RubyOnRails-esque ASP.NET
I've been playing with Ruby on Rails, and there's a lot to like.
There are some things that we won't be able to get while working in C#, but we could build some stuff to get closer. I know there are some people working on porting RoR to .NET but I prefer an approach that instead of porting it, it tries to take advantage of ASP.NET even if the framework is not the same.
I think the ASP.NET compilation model (which actually compiles everything in runtime), Build Providers, DLinQ and C# 3.0 are a good start, but we need more.
We need much better support for generics in the framework. The generics implementation is good but ASP.NET does not work well with them. For example, we need to be able to define asp.net controls that use generic types and use them in the .aspx pages.
I was thinking on implementing RoR scaffolding. It can be done, and as you can use ASP.NET controls you have a lot of power there (i.e, I can turn on paging by setting a property, use skins/themes, master pages, etc). The problem is that I need to generate the Page code itself, and that is not easy and it's not easy to extend/maintain.
What I want to have is a build provider that generates an ASPX page. I'm not sure if it can be built today, as the build provider needs to generate a CodeDom. ASPX pages have a build provider. I need to chain the build providers. If I can do that, the it will be much easier to implement scaffolding and also it will be very easy to generate the scaffolding static code so you can later customize it. I'm just thinking that it might be possible... I'll give it a try ;).