Does RAD for asp.net exist?

Question

I've built web sites using classic ASP, ASP.NET web forms and lately ASP.NET with ExtJS. However, I've always felt that I've had to do a lot of the heavy lifting and that there was no real RAD until the application was fairly mature.

I've only briefly looked at RoR and Django, but they look like a step in the right direction. Does anyone feel they have the equivalent mix of .net technologies for creating web sites quickly?

EDIT: I wanted to stay with mainstream tools (esp. open source or 'low cost') that work with ASP.NET. Also interested in fast framework configuration/setup, as my current project took lots of initial code (my)generation template work to get it to a RAD state.

Melissa

It would be nice to have a util that would take NHibernate .hbm.xml files and generate web forms and classes for you... – Renz

Have you tried ActiveRecord with ActiveWriter? It won't create the forms for you, but it'll create the classes. A little bit of code generation could create the CRUD webforms. – Melissa

Answer 1

You can try JQuery + ASP.NET MVC + Linq2SQL.

Is a good combination for a RAD. Or you can change linq2SQL by Subsonic

Affray

Does jQuery offer UI components like ExtJS? I like the ExtJS model of browser based UI fed by webservices, but it's hard work - not a lot of RAD. – Melissa

Answer 2

Well, asp.net is a lot more RAD than having to program the socket interface and handle the web requests yourself. I guess it's a matter of perspective. I'm still waiting for the device that I can plug directly into my brain and out pops whatever software I can think of. THAT would be RAD. :-)

Anthemion

I was thinking along the same lines - at one time anything involving an IDE like Visual Studio was considered RAD. I Guess its not RAD enough anymore :) – Oceanography

Seriously. Kids these days. ;-) – Anthemion

Yeah, I miss those good old days of a DOS text editor and command line compilation... well actually maybe not! – Melissa

I remember my first web apps were written in C and used CGI. You had to write your own libraries just to parse query string / form variables etc. I'd say ASP.NET is already very RAD! – Manzano

Answer 3

I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for but going by what others are posting, this is a more mature product:

http://www.ironspeed.com

Nims

At $2k a pop it better write the whole app for me ;-) – Melissa

Answer 4

I use asp.net with Telerik Rad controls with jQuery and telerik's client-side api It works well for me but its open to discussion of course

Thither