My future with web development

Lately, I've been feeling like I am digging myself into a shallow hole.  I feel that I am locking myself into a boring couple of years of asp.net development.  No offense to anyone, but asp.net has really lost steam for me.  Even with the recent release of asp.net 2.0, I feel myself wanting to drift to another language/platform.  Asp.net has just lost a lot of true innovation and watching MS time after time ignore community software is really getting to me.  If I were to pick a platform right now, I could pick Ruby On Rails.  There is such an amazing buzz around that language and framework, that it reminds me of the excitement that the internet used to have.  Extremely rapid development giving anyone with an idea a shot at making a virtual (and possibly physical) impact.

So why not dig myself out of the MS hole and start developing with RoR?  Well, there are a couple issues that I need to tackle before I can venture down that path.  First, RoR isn't optimal on the Windoze platform. Overall, this is fine by me, but I don't have a lot of time to learn how to configure Apache on a unix variant.  Second, I have some personal projects that are eating up every waking moment for me.  These projects are important to me and have a substantial code base, so porting them to RoR wouldn't make sense at this point.  I'll have to wait till I have a stable version of each project until I can port them.  Finally, my knowledge with asp.net and c# is much greater than RoR.  Taking the time to ramp up to coding techniques/syntax of Ruby is something that I cannot afford at this time.  Again, when my personal projects have hit a stable version, I will take the hit and learn Ruby more thoroughly.

If you're curious what prompted this short rant, I can answer that in two words... Visual Studio.  I cannot tell you how much I despise that piece of software.  I am jealous when I look at how simple and STABLE TextMate is.

So my ideal course of action is to get a working copy of OSX (either buy a power mac or get the osx86 dvd) and start developing under that OS. 


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