So I was talking with Michael Guterl, about the lack of a true Ruby user group in town. Rather than complain about it, I whipped out http://cincinnatirb.org/.

There are some well-known Ruby people in town; I’m not one of them. Despite my lack of credentials, I do love Ruby and don’t totally suck, but more importantly, the time has come for a Cincinnati.rb.

Come one, come all, it’s open hacking night every night—we’re going to let the meeting drive itself to wherever it wants to go.

P.S. We’re flexible about meeting space, but we’ll kick it off at the RecruitMilitary HQ in Loveland on Nov. 17th for meeting #1 at least.

Drop us a note if you want to show up :)

So ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 is about to hit the streets. I have been watching, waiting, hoping that the ASP.NET effort at copying Rails would be so compelling that I could stomach investing in .NET programming again.

The new preview 4 features:

• filter interceptors (before + after hooks for controllers)
• outputcache filters (action caching)
• handle error filters (custom error page)
• authorize filter (role-based authorization)
• accountcontroller class (wrapper to ASP.NET membership API)
• minor improvement to testing
• some ajax stuff

They are incorporating community-driven features, which is good. But I don’t think the project has anywhere near the velocity it needs. It’s taken them 2 months to get this new functionality out the door… I’m not very excited, because it’s hard not to compare what’s going on to present-day Rails, which is years ahead.

The big concerns I have about ASP.NET MVC are:

• still not opinionated enough. Rather than simplifying .NET web development, they are giving more choices
• the names they are giving features… ugh! Give me the silly Rails “plugin_fu” and “sexy_plugin” names any day vs. filter, filter, filter
• documentation not at your fingertips—maybe it’ll get there, but I bet there will never be a docs site for ASP.NET MVC as simple + easy to use as RailsBrain
• no plugin system that I’ve heard about
• not Restful… /:controller/:action/:id is so 2005. And I suppose for webservices, they still want developers to use SOAP?

I actually want the project to succeed, because it’s tough for organizations who have invested in .NET system to consider switch. And I want my .NET friends to be happier. They truly don’t know what they’re missing in the amazing Ruby community—Rails, Github, Merb, nginx/thin, Sinatra, Radiant, Shoulda, RSpec, and literally dozens of other interconnecting projects.

If a beginner was starting his ‘Rails journey’ should we advise traditional test::unit testing vs. new rspec testing… I think rspec is the future, and it’s now relatively stable, but it’s also more complicated + tricky than test::unit.

Would you advise newbies learn test::unit before rspec in order to more fully appreciate rspec?

I just gave advice not to test at all on first project, as learning Ruby + Rails is tough enough without trying to figure out testing… Did I goof?

The progress David Chelimsky is making on rspec is impressive, in particular his ability to take a diverse set of input and drive the project forward. Of course, big props go to Pat Maddox for driving the plain text file idea forward.

See David’s full post.

Vadim Gaidukevich wrote a great Agile PM system TargetProcess which we use (off-and-on) to track our .NET project work. (To be truthful, lately we’ve reverted to a paper notecard system as our team shrunk.)

So Vadim posts to his blog today a lamentation on how high the bar is to develop software compared to the “good old days.”

I agree with him 100%, and it’s one of the reasons I’m a fan of Ruby on Rails. It’s a world apart from C# in .NET, and it’s rough to get proficient in (for all the reasons Vadim mentions, so many areas learn) but it is very elegant, and just about everything you do is in Ruby.

Now if only I could find the time to make the leap from Rails rookie!

After a very hard decision-making process, we’re going to hold off on switching to Ruby + Rails for now at The Devine Group.

Primary factors:

1. Apparent lack of or difficulty in implementing cookieless apps (we need it for our assessments)
2. Lack of adequate charting components (we need for our reports)
3. Lack of internal knowledge of Unix-based deployment (Apache, FastCGI, etc.)
4. Lack of internal knowledge of Ruby
5. Internal resistance to switching from Microsoft platform (old dogs, new tricks)

I won’t go over all the things that impressed me about RoR, the list would be too long—I’m going to keep my eye on it and I’m not ruling it out for future development projects.

Well I’m getting sold on Ruby on Rails—My background: I started with implementing Perl scripts, then PHP, then ASP, most recently ASP.NET. In some ways it seems a step back to go to UNIX-based web tech, in other ways it feels a step forward (Agile, Design Patterns, Ruby’s highly OO nature, Test-Driven Development, Ajax, etc.) Anyone else make the jump from ASP.NET to RoR who regretted it + moved back to ASP.NET? I haven’t read many posts out there from people who went to Rails (actually built something) who reverted back…