Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no PHP hacker, nor (sadly) am I unfamiliar with ASP.NET. I was stuck at an "agile", highly "successful" .NET shop for 2 years. Client-corporate-intranet-land is completely divorced from the realm of what is possible . That entire world enforces such silly requirements on you that, well, maybe it is better to use .NET. But who wants to work in that kind of an environment? Who wants to use the MS tools to manage th…
This sounds cool, could you please describe what you use to achieve all this?
It's just your regular emacs + ruby(merb) workflow.
Merb console in one buffer for a repl-a-like (you can do more of a "real" merb repl if you want, starting the merb console from a ruby buffer in emacs, so you get the benefits of built-in ruby-mode for evaluation of forms at point, etc; I never use those shortcuts, so I use a regular old merb console running in an emacs shell, and either type into that or drag code from a code buffer when I want to see the effect of code live for some reason instead of just saving the file and letting merb auto-reload, which is default behavior).
The 'test, deploy' is just a rake task that wraps a capistrano deploy task (which is usually 90% wrapping git, heh) in a conditional: call the deploy task if rspec succeeded. Easy-peasy!
It's a joy.
Anyway, I don't see how the lack of .NET could even remotely be costing me ... anything. This is the standard way of developing for a LOT of people, you write the code, you deploy it if it doesn't break, you do it all with as few keystrokes as possible.
Of course, I'm sure one can concoct horror scenarios built upon stupid coworkers and unmaintainable scary piles of text and inscrutable shell scripts and lions, tigers, bears etc.
Well, don't work with idiots, and the FUD vanishes into thin air. Plenty of complex open-source projects thrive on a foundation of hardly more software than (vi,emacs) and (git, svn, whatever), so manifestly these tools are no obstacle to coding awesomeness.
As I said in the root: Microsoft PR piece.