Lately, I’ve been feeling like I am digging myself into a shallow
hole.  I feel that I am locking myself into a boring couple of
years of asp.net development.  No offense to anyone, but asp.net
has really lost steam for me.  Even with the recent release of
asp.net 2.0, I feel myself wanting to drift to another
language/platform.  Asp.net has just lost a lot of true innovation
and watching MS time after time ignore community software is really
getting to me.  If I were to pick a platform right now, I could
pick Ruby On Rails.  There is such an amazing buzz around that
language and framework, that it reminds me of the excitement that the
internet used to have.  Extremely rapid development giving anyone
with an idea a shot at making a virtual (and possibly physical) impact.

So why not dig myself out of the MS hole and start developing with
RoR?  Well, there are a couple issues that I need to tackle before
I can venture down that path.  First, RoR isn’t optimal on the
Windoze platform. Overall, this is fine by me, but I don’t have a lot
of time to learn how to configure Apache on a unix variant. 
Second, I have some personal projects that are eating up every waking
moment for me.  These projects are important to me and have a
substantial code base, so porting them to RoR wouldn’t make sense at
this point.  I’ll have to wait till I have a stable version of
each project until I can port them.  Finally, my knowledge with
asp.net and c# is much greater than RoR.  Taking the time to ramp
up to coding techniques/syntax of Ruby is something that I cannot
afford at this time.  Again, when my personal projects have hit a
stable version, I will take the hit and learn Ruby more thoroughly.

If you’re curious what prompted this short rant, I can answer that in
two words… Visual Studio.  I cannot tell you how much I despise
that piece of software.  I am jealous when I look at how simple
and STABLE TextMate is.

So my ideal course of action is to get a working copy of OSX (either
buy a power mac or get the osx86 dvd) and start developing under that
OS.