The Castle Project is an interesting open source alternative to ASP.NET / ADO.NET. Among other things, the Castle Project provides a Rails-like development framework for .NET. It has an ActiveRecord implementation built on top of NHibernate, a very Rails-like MVC setup called MonoRail, and uses NVelocity for template style views. It’s worth checking out. This screencast gives a bit of an overview.
There’s tough competition around the corner though, with Orcas already in beta, providing XAML, LINQ and O-R mapping.
Chris Ortman
I’m building an app on top of MonoRail right now and loving it. I don’t really see anything in Orcas that would deter me from using it either. Using MonoRail is like taking a blood oath to never touch a page that has __VIEWSTATE again.
Anonymous
This is an interesting dicussion – I agree with the previous, MonoRail and the entire Castle Project are extremely useful and very academic in their construction – using these tools is a great way to improve your skill set as a developer and I agree that they beat the usual webform to ADO.NET hands down.
However – in a years time you’ll probably benefit more from a CV boasting LINQ and LAMBDA than MonoRail and NHibernate.