A little late to the party perhaps, but the entry of Microsoft into this arena is going to prove interesting.
From the linked talk, it looks like they are taking a lot of ideas from existing frameworks, and not getting much wrong.
Microsoft are definitely making their stack much more appealing.
- IIS7 looks extremely pluggable (lifting pages from Apache), you can insert managed code into myriad extension points.
- VS2008 has LINQ (courtesy of .NET framework 3.5) and associated entity design and modeling tools for clean data access layers.
- Now the MVC framework, which looks like a very clean implementation, supporting both static and dynamic languages (courtesy of the DLR as far as I understand).
I know I’m going to get flak from some of my more opinionated friends for saying this, but look at the developments from a technical point of view, leaving aside the usual frothing about lock-in, and proprietary software, etc etc.
I can’t help but think this has the possibility to significantly decrease the amount of existing .NET developers switching to frameworks like Django or Rails – Microsoft has typically been very good with tooling, and this looks like it will be no exception.
Prove me wrong?