In addition to having the goal of learning Ruby on Rails, I am also diving into ASP.NET 2.0 using Visual Web Developer Express Edition.

My first impression, after using it for a couple days now, is Wow; a lot has changed from ASP.NET 1.1. I'm getting hung up on a variety of things like, no Bin folder, changes in namespaces and new server controls for data access. This is also my first use of the built in web server and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. Administrating these is different - simpler, but still different. I'm trying to compare using these free development tools to experiencing RoR for the first time.

A concern of mine is using the new server controls instead of the 'ol fashion way of writing things out. I remember how poor Visual Interdev was at generating clean code with their drag and drop controls, but I can already see these are much better, but usually IDE speed = more code generated and more resources at run time.

My goal is to quickly develop simple, robust web apps. The web projects I work on are usually not too complex: simple CRUD apps with emphasis on the interface. Rarely do I get into n-tier architectures. However, the tutorials do show how easy it is to build sites with several layers if needed.

RoR has a preconfigured app architecture that is more robust than the single tier project I'm currently working on and that's a good feature. It makes you conform to best practices.

More to come as I proceed.