Ruby In Steel - beta preview
Just to bring you up to date on the progress of the Ruby In Steel programming IDE for Visual Studio 2005, here are a couple of pictures of the current beta…
This shows a few features of the Steel IDE. As you can see you can group your individual Ruby programs inside ‘projects’ (top right) and Solutions. These are organisational aids and are slightly different from, say C# projects and solutions, as Ruby In Steel is not a .NET programming tool. Notice that the editor has syntax sensitive Ruby colour coding and code collapsing. The pane down at the bottom of the screen is the integrated Ruby console. This lets you run the currently selected program in the Ruby interpreter and interact with it from within the Visual Studio environment (you don’t have to pop up a command prompt window - though this is also provided as an option).
This picture shows the integrated syntax error trapping. Double-click an error message in order to highlight the problem line in the editor. Oh, and to run the program, just press F5 or click the Visual Studio ‘Run’ icon…
We announced the Ruby In Steel project on March 1st 2006. We shall be releasing the first public beta before the end of April. Keep visiting the site (or subscribe to our RSS feed) to keep up to date 
March 28th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
I’m watchign this project with great interest. Being a .NET hacker by day, VS.NET is one of my favorite IDEs. Of course, its the intellisense that makes it so. I hope you are able to bring that aspect over into this project!
March 29th, 2006 at 9:51 am
I’ve just been looking at Intellisense. It’s neat the way VS does it and it’s certainly do-able, at least to some extent. The problem with Ruby is that it isn’t a static language, so that the methods on an object (say) vary as the program is run. In the IDE you normally aren’t running the program, so that leads to a little difficulty.
Still, its possible to figure out the static methods of a class and its ancestors, and it should be possible to display the basic ‘mixins’.
You’re right about VS, though. And VS 2005 is simply superb to work with!
April 12th, 2006 at 2:29 am
Looks really interesting! I am really looking forward to trying it out.
April 12th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
[…] Microsoft Dinner at Eclipse Con 2006! While at Eclipse Con my counter part Nima and I planned a dinner. We thought it would be great to have a chance to speak to some of the Eclipse contributors about open source and where their respective projects are headed. This was FANTASIC because we had a chance to speak to Mark, Kyle and Matt from RadRails, Richard Hamnett talking about Asterisk and Max Carlson from OpenLaszlo, rich internet applications. We were also pleased to have Tom Crozier and from Microsoft. Matt, Kyle and Mark are very futuristic and as they said: “The only ones at he exhibit hall with a free product!” They also said: “Everyone else at the exhibit hall is waiting for someone to come up with a piece of code which they can then package and sell, we are the only ones here without a product and everyone is surprised when we tell them we are Free!” RadRails sees offering support as a way to make money and are willing to look into creating a plug for Visual Studio. Ruby on Rails (RoR) for Visual Studio? Now that will be interesting. More about Ruby in VS I still think RoR will be cool for VS. We are also working with some of the dinner attendees as they had a chance to learn from us what it is like to work at Microsoft and are very interested in an internship opportunity. Amazingly the attendee age was the older wiser however the contributor age and the age of the contributors to Eclipse who are leading is fairly young the early college student age. Published Wednesday, April 12, 2006 1:03 PM by AniB […]