Ruby In Steel IDE - first beta now available
The first public beta of the Steel IDE for programming Ruby in Visual Studio 2005 is now available for download. Ruby In Steel 0.5.12 provides syntax sensitive code colouring and collapsing; a fully integrated interactive console which can be docked within the Visual Studio environment; integrated syntax error handling - click on the error message to locate the problem line in your source code; automatic bracket highlighting; bracket matching to move your cursor between brackets; a project management pane in which you can arrange groups of Ruby projects as branches in a tree; auto-commenting and uncommenting of Ruby code; plus many of the same editing features you would expect in any Visual Studio project such as multi-level undo/redo, split-window editing; toggle-bookmark and find/replace with regular expressions.
From now on, we shall be issuing regularly updated beta versions of Ruby In Steel (at one or two monthly intervals) with new features added in each release.
April 24th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Looking good!
Any chance this add-in will work with the version of VS2005 that gets installed with the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit?
I believe it is labeled Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Premier Partner Edition - ENU
Thanks!
April 24th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
This looks great. VS is a great IDE and I like finally seeing ruby colored correctly (yes, I’m from the US). Obviously a lot of work has gone into this - thank you!
April 24th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
I don’t exactly know about which version of Visual Studio is required. The Permier Partner edition is (I think) a stripped down Visual Studio, so I’m not sure. The restriction isn’t one we’ve imposed - it’s Microsoft’s.
I’ve a feeling that the bottom line is that if you’ve paid for any sort of Visual Studio edition (including those via MSDN subscription), VS extension packages will work. If you’ve just got a free Express edition downloaded from Microsoft’s website, packages wont load.
April 24th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
I’ve been using this for a few hours and it’s great! Very slick. Here’s a couple of suggestions:
1) Have a better place for suggestions than this comment box
2) Allow me to pass arguments to “Ruby Command”. Bonus: Let me specify arguments to always use (easily) or whether I want to be prompted for arguments each time.
3) The heredoc bug can be avoided if you don’t indent the closing heredoc tag. At least there is a workaround.
4) Navigation to error lines from call stacks don’t work consistently, especially if hte call stack is deep and/or spans several files. Example: This call stack
test_table_errors(RdecBuilderTests):
TypeError: compared with non class/module
../lib/rdec_builder.rb:374:in `partition’
-:5363:in `test_table_errors’
The bottom line navigates fine. The second line (in another file) does not.
5) Allow output to go to a tool window. I find myself tabbing over the ruby output window a lot and trying to run it again - somewhat irritating.
Overall a great beta. Install experience went great and the syntax coloring looks great so far. Also very speedy!
April 24th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
Another quick suggestion - implement those nifty drop-downs for navigating classes and/or functions in the current file - they are pretty handy when you get a large file full of methods and objects!
April 24th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
Thanks for the comments. Dermot will probably deal with points 2 to 4. In relation to point 1 - how to leave comments. Currently you can either leave comments here or you can send email direct to us at ’support ( at ) sapphiresteel ( dot ) com’.
I will be installing a CMS system on this site later in the summer which will include a more sophisticated ‘comment forum’ capability than WordPress (the software behind this blog). It’s going to take time to get it all set up to my satisfaction, however and, unfortunately, time isn’t something I have much of just at the moment. But have patience and we will get there eventually…
May 3rd, 2006 at 10:39 pm
the PPE will load package plug-ins, but if you have a dependency on any components that are language specific they will not be there and you will get a failure. the solution to that is to factor out all language dependencies and only light up features when the other language is installed.