Thanks for the topic, I gonna try it! as now I thinks Ruby/Rails style is coming.

best wishes
Huw

Another thing is monorail community is still small where ASP.NET forum is very very active, when we need help, we know we could get some.

We didn’t want to waste too much time, so doing the standard “asp.net” way will be most flexible. Although not totally MVC, it’s at least decent compare to JSF and Php or whatever.

Personally I cant wait that long and have gone all rails for new development. But it wont take much to get me back on .NET as I have tons of respect for the platform and its future.

Bob responds: Very good points! It is an interesting question for another post as to what a “real developer” is and how much of a “real developer” one has to be to produce quality web apps. However, for purposes of this post I’ll just say that for better or worse, ASP.NET is a widely accepted and comfortable abstraction and I don’t see enough thoughtful reflection going on, especially in the corporate world, to motivate large numbers of ASP.NET developers to step outside that comfort zone. For every person who does not chalk up their daily frustrations with ASP.NET to “just the way things are”, there are probably at least ten people who do … and will stick with the status quo.

I wanted to introduce you to Visual WebGui which is an open source extension for ASP.NET aimed at developing complex AJAX applications like outlook web access in a very intuitive way and rapid way.

Visual WebGui extends ASP.NET by providing an alternative pipeline that provides full WinForms like programming including design time capabilities. With this solution you have the power of rapid developing application as you do in WinForms with out loosing the ability to still use web concepts were needed.

To see the framework in action check these quick start videos here:
http://www.visualwebgui.com/Default.aspx?tabid=297

The project home page is here:
http://www.visualwebgui.com

Guy Peled
Founder & Chief Architect
Gizmox – Visual WebGui

Bob responds: Looks like a great product and I will definitely investigate further. However, on the surface at least it looks like you’re going further down the path Microsoft has already taken: abstracting away the mechanics of building a web app with layers of complex plumbing. The whole point of this particular post was to question that wisdom and consider whether we aren’t better off in the long run with a pattern like MVC that embraces the nature of web apps rather than fighting them. For me the jury is still out; likely in the end I will end up finding something like your product as a more politically acceptable alternative for many of the environments I work in, which will hopefully make ASP.NET development more enjoyable and maintainable; but I’m determined to have a rails-style experience or two, in order to make an intelligent comparison.

Bob responds: Nor did I claim that it does. However every platform / methodology has a “typical” adoption path and judging from the MonoRail tutorial, the use of such ORMs are encouraged. As such, community support will tend lean in that direction. Hopefully I’ll find out for myself soon!