One time I saw an asp.net question on StackFlow, and I just saw that:
71,722 questions tagged for asp.net, 13.7k followers
see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/asp.net
For Ruby on Rails,
36,434 questions tagged ruby-on-rails, 9.4k followers
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ruby-on-rails
So is asp.net close to 40% to 100% the popularity of Ruby on Rails, and how does it compared to Ruby on Rails really? (good to use, easy, elegant, stable, lots of gems or plugins, lot of gems or plugins that has documentation and overview?)
For the programming standpoint, I was thinking that, if asp.net is released every 6 months or 9 months, with a clear cut version, with stable and detailed documentation, then it is actually easier for the programmers because we don’t get the “this gem work with Rails 3.0.0 but not with 3.0.6, but you can use this gem, which works for Rails 2.3.11 and up but if you have an older project using 2.3.5, then it won’t work. Or it works for Rails 2.3 but not for 3.0, so let’s find something else, or we haven’t using this gem but it hasn’t been developed or debugged for 5 months and don’t know if it works 100% for Rails 3.0 or not and there are 32 issues on GitHub, do we need to use something else? This gem depends on 5 other gems and has 0 documentation, 0 API spec, 0 overview, 10 lines of installation instructions, and there are 40 files with 3,200 lines of code — you ask the author on GitHub for documentation, overview, or API spec, or to add it to GitHub, and his answer: read the code. Is that true for this programming aspect?
In general, what libraries you will find for ASP.Net, will work with forward compatibility. Microsoft is much more reluctant to introduce backward compatibility problems than the Rails(or even Ruby) team. That being said, there is not a clear cut framework for plugins for ASP.Net. They all generally have different install instructions and such that must be carried out manually.
My personal opinion:
Ruby provides more elegant code, but I’ve often seen that doing anything “outside the box” with Rails is less than elegant. I use ASP.Net because of this, and I like C# more as a language than PHP. I prefer the statically(ish)-typed nature of C# for web applications, whereas I use Ruby and PHP commonly for scripting and for small programs/web applications which require little logic. Many people may tell you the exact opposite of this, it is just a matter of opinion