First, let me get this out of the way.  I love C#, it’s become far and away my favorite language.  I am not a huge fan of ASP.NET though……it just seems like Microsoft just tried to force a round peg into a square hole and jam WinForms into the web.  It doesn’t work for me, it’s just not how the web works in my mind.  I’ll admit, this could be because I cut my teeth with PHP, and ASP.NET is just a radically different way to develop a website.

All that changed when I decided to give MonoRail a try.  The guys over at the Castle Project have really hit a home run with this in my eyes.  MonoRail is a model-view-controller framework for the web, and as you would expect this separates the data layer, the UI (HTML) and the controller logic.

One thing you lose is the ability to use web controls in ASP.NET, but I honestly don’t miss that anyway.  I’m much more comfortable generating my own HTML.  I end up getting frustrated trying to get different controls to work, because they ALMOST did what I wanted, but just didn’t quite get there.

Don’t take my word for it, head on over and give it a shot!  I’m going to give ActiveRecord a try next and see where that takes me.