Tim Case was playing the .NET game when one destined Saturday afternoon sent him a wakeup call:

Last November one Saturday afternoon I was pissed off and frustrated trying to get NHibernate to work with my middle-tier C# layer, and in the midst of my difficulties I did what all great people do when faced with tough problems and hardship… I procrastinated by surfing the net. From Prag Dave’s site I made it the the rails site and in attempt to further prove that techology lies I ran the 10 minute intro video…

10 minutes later, I couldn’t believe what I had just saw, so I started doing the Rails academy tutorials…

One hour later, my jaw was on the ground as I stared at my todo application running from MySQL so I started investigating rails further…

Two hours later my .NET career was over. It literally happened that afternoon. I no longer had any interest in NHibernate or even seeing Visual Studio ever again.

Tim Case also wrote an interesting article called “Where the Rails came from…” that traces the influences of Kent Beck (TDD), Eric Evans (DDD), Martin Fowler (PoEAA), Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt (Pragmatic Programmer), and a lot more. We’ll see if we can get that online shortly.