Lightweight Development in .Net: Nancy
theothersideofcode.com
theothersideofcode.com
There seems to be a growing movement with OWIN, Knack, Nancy and other like projects. The .NET community is tired of sitting by as the OSS community is leaving them in the dust with cool tools and frameworks like Rack, Sinatra, Gems, Bundler, Django, Pylon and Node.js that are simpler and faster to develop with. They're tired of waiting for a new version of Visual Studio just to use a new tech. They're tired of waiting for MS to "bless" new technology. Nancy and other ALT.NET projects are trying to free and grow the C# community independent of MS and the enterprise developers making boring CRUD apps.
.NET needs something like this. C# has transformed into a wonderful and enjoyable language in 4.0, but the rest of the .NET Framework is still stuck in over-engineered enterprise-heavy wannabe Java C# 1.0 land. ASP.NET MVC is a good beginning, but this style of thinking really needs to be more pervasive in the rest of the framework.
Luckily, there are some changes made recently with projects like the above mentioned, but also Simple.Data, Massive, Spark, as well as more comprehensive frameworks like S#arp Architecture, FubuMVC or MVC Turbine, or platforms like AppHarbor.
Let's hope of more of stuff like these, as well as some real world projects built on top of all that.