Now is a time for healing. See, with Ruby storming onto the scene in so many venues of discussion, it’s now time to survey the wreckage—to look back at the big octagonal gash we left in the sheet rock, at the array of pipe-smoking scholars whose top hats we’ve knocked asunder, and, yes, at the bittersweet scent of lifelong friendships we’ve effortlessly discarded.

Take .Net. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say .Net is fine. That, aside from deep doctrinal friction I feel in its presence, it’s actually a very nice set of tools. ASP.Net, in particular, was a great bounding forward. I wouldn’t give it all my love, but I might award it a refurbished spelling bee trophy.

Paul Nicholls is working with Rails on IIS. And, personally, the coolest part is the URL rewriting module he’s assembling with the open source Dev-C++ IDE. It’s not mod_rewrite, just a simple tokenizer tailored for Rails specifically.

Anyway, peering down the road a few months, I’m envisioning an angle on the One-Click Server Installer with a wee checkbox for IIS.