Well today has been an interesting day. I signed up for a day of presentations on user experience, which is something that can always improve. Turns out it are a bunch of presentations on Microsoft Expression (I guess in some ways that has to do with user experience )It’s not something I personally will be using as it is more designer focussed and I use visual studio for all my development and web design.
Over the last couple of months or so I have been sensing that Microsoft isn’t what they used to be and I’m not the only one that is inclined to think that way
Mostly because I’m currently working as a sole developer in my own company I feel very much left out by them.
Most of the issues I have is to quickly develop something, where I am in full control of what happens, is not something that is easily done in asp.net. (For more on reasons why I like castle vs asp.net webforms : Am I too late, A bit further down the castle track
Back to the original story
Those presentations didn’t really hold value for me but I got into a conversation with 2 microsoft employees that were there with the goal of finding out why people like me are moving to rails and what microsoft isn’t giving us and they should.
My main points of discomfort would be:
Feeling of not being in control
Complexity to get it to render out pages
Slow development pass (might be ok if you’re a giant company in which people actually hold meetings and have managers but not in my case). I’m all about agile (not to be confused with the TFS agile method) development. Plan, build, ship within 2 months would be average.
Need to know a page lifecycle (which is statefull programming in a stateless environment, need i say more)
Complexity to get things done
No proper sample code available that shows something beyond “Hello world”
Anyway we had this interesting talk about it, now it’s again a case of waiting to see if they can make a change before the new year to keep me interested.
While I’m on the subject. Next week will be the week in which I’ll try to build my first RoR site. I’m pretty confident that it will work out and then i can finally assess myself which one is better for what.
Ok I’m off to buy Agile webdevelopment with ruby now