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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T07:57:50+00:00

I like the Rails approach to web application development quite a bit, but in

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I like the Rails approach to web application development quite a bit, but in my current occupation I should like to use .NET technology. What is the premier Rails-style framework in the .NET world? I understand Microsoft has developed ASP.NET MVC as such a framework, but my knowledge of it is totally superficial at this point.

Ease of testing is particularly important to me, I love how you can write testable scenarios for Rails with Cucumber. Testing of Javascript bits should be accounted for as well.

In sum: I’m looking for a .NET alternative that offers the same complete development stack, from end-to-end, you get with Rails 🙂

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  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, you are right. ASP.NET MVC 3.0 is the framework you are looking for. And it does offer you the complete stack.

    For Cucumber style testing you can use SpecFlow. There are other BDD tools too but SpecFlow is the closest to Cucumber as both are based on Gherkin.

    For learning MVC, I would suggest the following tutorials, preferably in the same order:

    1. The getting-started-with-mvc3-part1-cs video on the official ASP.NET MVC website.
    2. Next try the Music Store tutorial, once again on the official ASP.NET MVC website. This take things up one notch.
    3. You can then google for the nerd dinner tutorial. This is a great tutorial but I am not sure if it has been completely updgraded to ASP.NET MVC 3 or not.
    4. http://www.asp.net/mvc/videos: This has a whole lot of videos. You can see The Storefront video series for an example of how to create a complex website using MVC.
    5. Lastly, there are some excellent videos (though paid) on tekpub for mastering mvc and building a blog in mvc.

    Between these tutorials you will not only just learn the basics, you will also learn Linq2SQL or Entity Framework (ORM), Ninject (Dependency Injection), Moq (Mocking framework), SpecFlow, etc…

    In case, you want to try something on your own, you can start with the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Starter Site
    released by Rob Conery (from Tekpub) on codeplex. Rob is an expert on both ASP.Net MVC and Ruby on Rails and shares the same concerns as you. While this is in MVC 2.0, it should also work with version 3.

    Hope this helps.

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