Ok so I have fallen in love with RoR as a development enviroment, its easy, elegent, and for compatent developers it can increase productivity astronomicly.. BUT it has a huge problem for Windows enviroments; it has no solid deployment stratagy for windows ( and no mongrel clusters behind apache don't count). Below are the methods I have tried any my opinion of their results.

1) Fast CGI on IIS using the old Fast CGI ISAPI filter: Slow (10, 12 connections per second) and I couldn't find an elegent way for it to run multiple sites.

2) Fast CGI on IIS using the new Microsoft Fast CGI tech preview 2: Faster BUT it couldn't handle default routes (routes to the root of a site) and it crashed when I had more than 1 app (first app would run fine, second one would keep crashing). Oh and did I mention it was a Tech Preview :-P

3) Fast CGI on Apache: I tried, 2.0, 2.2, FastCGI, fcgid, and about 2 million other combinations. I never got it work work! (I followed 3 diffrent tutorials about 10 times each, even mixing and matching steps where I thought one may have had a typo.) This may be because I am on Windows Server 2003 x64. But thats about the only reason I could find that thse just  "wouldn't work"

4) X Mongral Services running with apache as the balancer: This works great until you consider scale. It takes about 40megs per mongral instance (instance + ruby). and you need one Mongral per connection you want to handle (simaltanious, not per/second). So if I want to handle 200 connections/second and my Mongrals can each handle 10 per second, then I need 20 mongrals running. Now multiply that by 40 megs, and you are burning 800 megs of ram just on my app. This is not so go.

5) Linux VM running inside my windows box: One major downside. I can only connect to my SQL server via ODBC. Enough said.

So what are my options.

1) Ditch windows: Ya sorry, not going to happen.

2) Ditch Sql Server: See above answer.

3) Live with it and wait for iron ruby to support rails: I would if I thought iron ruby on rails was just around the corner, but its my bet its atleast 18 months out before its solid and production ready (remember iron ruby is only pre-alpha).

4) Do [X] (where X is the suggestion you place in the comments below): I am all ears.

5) Bite the bullet now (before there is TO much development to turn back) and port to Monorail or another MVC style framework that places nice with IIS and Windows: This is high on my list.

5) Give up on the clean goodness of a forced MVC framework and go back to traditional ASP.NET: This may also happen; but I am not a fan of this.

Suggestions are (of course) very welcome.