I think I may have found my .Net stack to replace rails: Spark, MVC (Monorail or ASPNet), FluentNHibernate, NHibernate, and FluentMigrator. With these, I get similar productivity to rails, except the generators (yes, AspNet MVC has some templates and stuff).
See, I’ve got this pet project which I’ve destroyed and rebuilt several times. It started in Ruby on Rails; and I got about 90% function, but I kept stalling. Figuring I could overcome that in .Net – no, I haven’t really – I re-wrote yet again in .Net. Well more like started to re-write it. I used Prawn and prawnto for the pdf feature. So in going through the Spark sample code, I noticed one sample seems to generate PDF’s. Woohoo! I’m going to need that, and right there it is. Also, it looks really simple.
There are also samples showing internationalization, modularization, client rendering (aka ajax), IoC, integration with Monorail, and other things. All around really impressive and practical stuff. I’ll continue to play with Spark, but I’ve pretty much been convinced already. I’d recommend anyone check it out.