Moving from Desktop Development to Web Development [closed]

PHP, Ruby On Rails, ASP.Net, or Java.

It's a religious choce and it depends on who you ask.

Everyone you ask will give you a different answer.

You should ask yourself how you want to work, PHP java and ASP all let you write markup that is interspersed with code or code that writes the markup for you.

To be honest it's subjective and no one will be able to give you a straight answer.

Given your two options ASP is probably a better choice for industry though, there is a lot of money in it and C# is close enough to C/C++ for it to be readable.

Why don't you take a few days or a week to experiment with Rails, just for fun? You might, like many other devs before, find a real liking for it and 'fall in love' with Ruby and revitalize your programming interest. If not you just embrace ASP.net which will feel more natural to you anyway.

Other commenters have not mentioned that the number 1 advantage of both Ruby and Rails is 'pleasure of programming'.

Alsa these days talented Ruby programmers are in very high demand. There is much more demand than supply. You can do the math as far as earning potential.

I spend most of my time doing ASP.NET development and recently I had taken a turn against it due to the difficulty in really testing my apps. Like lubos hasko outlined above, with ASP.NET MVC, LINQ and the new features in C# and even the ability to write .NET web service that can be consumed by Silverlight, I have gotten excited about it again and think you could do well getting into it. That said, I have no experience of Ruby but after some of the comment on here, I think I'll have a look at it.