Transitioning from Ruby on Rails to ASP.NET and C#

Having immediately moved from an RoR project to a webapp in C#, I’m having some trouble coping with the amount of code you have to write and number of files you have to create to do the simplest things.

For example, if you want a date selector in Rails, you can do something simple like

<% form_for @my_item %>
...
<%= calendar_date_select :date %>
...
<% end %>

This gives you a pretty little date selector and automagically looks at the date attribute on @my_item. Now, I don’t know .NET very well, so I cannot really give sample code for it, but basically, it’s a disaster. There are providers, and the code behind them, there are controls, and the code behind them….AAAHHHHH.

And then there’s the issue of deciphering between creating a new object and editing an existing one. Of coures, in Rails, the form_for @my_item decides for you. No such crazy black magic in .NET…or Java for that matter.