Been a .NET developer since Beta 1. Spent the last 2.5 years in open source land.
ASP.NET has some good ideas, but the paradigm is completely incorrect. As another poster stated, it attempts to mimic WinForms development on the web, which is a layer of complexity that simply needn't exist.
ASP.NET MVC is a step in the right direction, but requires a crapload of plumbing and, honestly, is too little too late.
RoR ... I've only used it doing research. ActiveRecord seems like a bloated ORM with a lot of unnecessary overhead. Ruby is a kick ass language though.
Django is cool if you can look past the unfortunate choice of terminology.
You couldn't pay me enough to work on ASP.NET site at this point, on the other hand Rails has a tax that you'll have to pay some time in the future.
My only recommendation is to go the open source route. A lot of your problems have already been solved, and some of those solutions are MIA on windows. I laugh at Jeff Atwood running PHP on IIS and being steamed that there isn't anything approaching mod_rewrite for IIS 7. Vendor lock-in must really suck.
I strongly second the thought here (and in a few other comments above) that .NET fails because it tries to make web programming work like desktop programming. It doesn't.
ASP.NET has some good ideas, but the paradigm is completely incorrect. As another poster stated, it attempts to mimic WinForms development on the web, which is a layer of complexity that simply needn't exist.
ASP.NET MVC is a step in the right direction, but requires a crapload of plumbing and, honestly, is too little too late.
RoR ... I've only used it doing research. ActiveRecord seems like a bloated ORM with a lot of unnecessary overhead. Ruby is a kick ass language though.
Django is cool if you can look past the unfortunate choice of terminology.
You couldn't pay me enough to work on ASP.NET site at this point, on the other hand Rails has a tax that you'll have to pay some time in the future.
My only recommendation is to go the open source route. A lot of your problems have already been solved, and some of those solutions are MIA on windows. I laugh at Jeff Atwood running PHP on IIS and being steamed that there isn't anything approaching mod_rewrite for IIS 7. Vendor lock-in must really suck.