MonoRail in a commerical world
MonoRail is a very hot topic with me right now so this post from Scott Bellware is timely. Scott makes an interesting point.
[MonoRail] simplifies web development on .NET much in the way that Ruby on Rails simplifies web development period. Corporate shops building web apps on .NET are largely staffed with developers who have been exposed only to those ideas and approaches that Microsoft has allowed passage into its customer collective consciousness.
Rails exposes a number of key concepts to the consciousness, namely patterns (like MVC) and testability, and these are baked right into the framework. You can use Rails and not be aware your using these things because it's a a part of the framework, you don't have to go to any extra lengths to make use of patterns or achieve testability because the framework is built on these things. In web space of .NET these things feel unnatural because webforms does not make use of them. MVP and MVC in a webform context feels unclean because you working against the tide, yet ASP.NET as a framework is great (with some exceptions around context) framework to build against. My real hope is that we see the same sort of bake in that Rails enjoys.