Ruby on Rails vs ASP.NET MVC 3 for a .NET Guy? [closed]
They are both fantastic, and can accomplish the same goals very quickly. I used a great book to learn a while back, and it would be right up your alley: Rails for .Net Developers
Also, I wrote a post about going from MVC to RoR a while back as well.
As for comparisons, they both have strengths as has been covered, but here are a few that stick out to me:
I really do like RoR's deployment and simple ways to push to live sites - no scripts to run at all, just a bit of command line should get you up and running once the code is actually written. If you choose RoR, UNDERSTAND THE COMMAND LINE COMMANDS - it will make your life so much easier!
As you mentioned, the plugins are great, and can really be used to speed things up.
As a .Net dev, MVC will be a breeze, I would recommend using Razor, as it is very simple and less cluttered than the old 2.0 non-razor rendering.
.Net's EF4 can be compared almost directly to RoR's ActiveRecord, great ORM systems tfor dealing with data.
I have found that .Net's documentation is a bit more consistent and thorough.
One problem I had with RoR was the rapid and drastic changes; not so long ago, they upgraded to 3.0 on my host, and I did not lock my version - all sorts of stuff broke until I figured out the new stuff (I should have frozen my version).
It is not a clean cut choice - both are great. As you are already a .Net dev, I would guess MVC3 would be the way to go, but both are easy to learn.
I use and like both, and the problem with a question like this is that they're so different that you could go on all day about apples vs. oranges, but since your question is pretty non-specific, I'll just say:
If you consider yourself "a .NET guy," then you should learn a language which works very differently than C#, and a dynamic language like Ruby isn't a bad place to start. (Another option would be a functional language like Haskell, Scala, etc.)
You will be a better programmer after you do, and you won't have to call yourself "a .NET guy" anymore!
Not a RoR dev here, but I do Django and I think the same question could be asked for Django as well. The #1 thing that I like Django over ASP.NET MVC is that Django comes with the ORM already. Which means most any code examples you'll find on the web will kind of follow a similar pattern. With ASP.NET MVC you can pick from lots of different ORMs which can be a good thing, but can also cause confusion.
Just like @Craig said though, it really is apples vs oranges. I'd pick ASP.NET MVC if I was required to deploy it on a MS stack, and use Django for "personal" projects or projects that required it on to be deployed on linux.