I've spent a lot of time on both rails and asp.net mvc over the past year. If you would have asked me 2 years ago, Rails was a clear winner, because of ActiveR

I've spent a lot of time on both rails and asp.net mvc over the past year. If you would have asked me 2 years ago, Rails was a clear winner, because of ActiveRecord Migrations, Heroku, MVC, RSpec, Gem Framework, great libs like Devise, Sunspot, Asset Management, and Ruby's dynamic features like hashes and DSL creation. On the downside, I had to code in Vim / RubyMine. Windows support is lacking and most Rails apps fail on Windows because of native compilation errors. I end up dual booting to Ubuntu which is a pain. What VS had was a great IDE, strong typing and a clear language roadmap. In 2012, things are a little less clear. * ASP.NET MVC4 is very similar to Rails * Both Azure Websites and AppHarbor support a lot of what heroku offers * C# 4 has dynamic language support * Entity Framework has migrations and is more mature. * NuGet and T4 Scaffolding has really taken off * F# is a supported CLR language, so if you like Python style coding, you are fine * MSFT is posting a lot more "core" code to open source repos (like Entity Framework) I'd argue that Rails is still superior because the ecosystem is more vibrant, but a lot of that "energy" has moved to NodeJs. Ruby language improvements are murky and debugging is still challenging.