A trip to the Castle

In the past week I have been fiddling a bit with the Castle frameworks, because I just had to see what they were up to with Monorail, their Rails for .NET framework. While i think the ideas behind Monorails, and what they have made are technically excellent. There are some things that bug me. I am irritated by the lack of a proper view engine. I think that both NVelocity and Brail are downright messy to look at. Giving me all sorts of ASP like creeps. The ability to use WebForms is in that regard extremely promising, being BOBW - but the limitations they have right now are somewhat prohibiting. Granted, I haven't taken it for a spin yet too see how bad it really is, so I can't be trusted as a real source. I need to do that some day soon.

But anyway, in the process of Monorailing along, I discovered one great little gem. The ActiveRecord. This is a small framework that glues NHibernate and Monorail together, offering a smooth ride through database country. And that one rocks. I haven't used NHibernate much, cause making all those pesky XML files and lugging then along when doing whatever just turned me off big time. But this little bugger just removes all of that and makes it a joyous ride. It even generates the database for you if you're lazy! 8)

So, the latest thing I am working on is using ActiveRecord and plain old ASP.NET, and it is great. Looking for a tutorial to get started are ya? Well - that is already done - head over to Castle and get going!