Some angels visited me in a dream and told me to get off my Microsoft high horse. They told me to go to http://www.rubyonrails.com. I think I may have seen the light. I was getting really tired of the .NET framework being either ridiculously high-level with widgets that made your page look and act like a dorky .NET site or ridiculously low-level where you had to write a bunch of code for pretty standard database/middle-tier transactions.