I have spent the past few weeks working on two projects. One is brand new and very exciting – houseplans.info. I developed that site in Ruby on Rails and it uses mysql on the backend. That project took me about four weeks working a few hours in the evenings. It is a joy to work on. I compare that to The Plan Collection which I have spent the last 7 years working on. It is written in old ASP and is painful to work on. I have been updating it to ASP.Net here and there and it just isn’t as much fun as working in Ruby on Rails. By fun I mean that in twenty seconds I can setup url rewrites in Rails while I spent several days testing, debugging and cussing url rewrites in ASP.Net. I’m still not done. So far I am still unable to find a way for a form to post back to the rewritten url. ASP.Net happily ignores the rewrite and sets the form postback for you and refuses to give you a way to change it.
Open source is so much better and lets me be in a happy place.