How to make .NET development less of a black box to a Rails developer?

Question

I have been spoiled by Ruby on Rails. However, my present 9-5 has me working with the Microsoft .NET framework--from classic ASP to ASP.NET to ASP.NET MVC. I'm struggling to understand more deeply our code, because I feel like I'm missing:

• script/server, or a live tail of a development log, to provide debuggable runtime info
• script/console, or an interactive console preloaded with my application's objects
• a usable stack trace of runtime exceptions

I understand that there won't be exact equivalents for these tools; .NET uses completely different technologies. I just need to know what are the best ways of getting these kinds of information when I'm developing a .NET app.

UPDATE: As much as I appreciate the answers suggesting Visual Studio tools, which I think will be helpful to many others, I want to add that I am an efficient vim (text editor) user, and I just can't bring myself to use a bulky IDE. Where possible, please suggest command-line solutions that I might be able to plug into my minimalist workflow!

Answer 1

I would attach visual studio to the web server process and use the debugger. The Output will give you the development log, and by using breakpoints, watches, etc, you can interact with the objects, get/change their values, etc. Exceptions will cause the debugger to break where you can see the call stack and all variables at that point.

Answer 2

For .net, most of your tooling is focused in Visual Studio. When I started in ROR coming from a vb.net/asp.net, the biggest jump for me was having to go to different places to see errors, run WEBrick etc where in .net I would do it all from VS.