Sapphire In Steel

As you may have noticed, we have now redesigned this site using the SPIP CMS. This provides us with many more features than are available when using WordPress - the software that manages this Blog.

It also has threaded ‘comment forums’ which should make it much easier to leave feedback.

From now on we won’t be using this WordPress blog though we’ll leave it online for now just in case you want to browse through older posts. However, if you want to keep up to date with the development of Sapphire and Ruby In Steel, please be sure to log onto the main site:
http://www.sapphiresteel.com
and subscribe to our new RSS feed:
http://www.sapphiresteel.com/backend.php3

best wishes
Huw

Having initially tried to run this site in the form of this WordPress blog and some static HTML pages, we have now come to the conclusion that this combination is not up to the job . We have therefore been working on a completely new, fully dynamic site which we’ll be installing over the next week or so. We’ve developed this in the odd moments which we have free when not developing Steel (ok, so we don’t sleep much these days) using the excellent site management software, SPIP. No, it’s not written in Ruby; it’s PHP, but hey, we’re not linguistic chauvinists (in any case, SPIP’s version of PHP is decidedly French - it’s peppered with Boucles rather than Loops, Rubriques instead of Sections and so on).

The simple fact of the matter is that we tried out something like a dozen different CMS (Content Management Systems) scripts and decided that SPIP was by far the best for our requirements. Gradually we’ll be moving most (or all) of the content of this site into SPIP. For the time being, you can carry on referring to this Blog for any news. Naturally we’ll let you know when the Blog itself will be ready to migrate to SPIP.

Incidentally, for those of you who have subscribed to our RSS feed, I’m afraid that, due to the fact that we’ve had to move WordPress into a new directory, the direct link to its RSS feed is now broken. Apologies for that but WordPress provides no (obvious) way of maintaining the directory structure to a feed when the software itself is moved. At any rate, we’ll have a new Feed online soon when SPIP is up and running.

People have been asking us if we’ll be providing support for Rails programming in Steel. The answer, in brief, is: yes! Absolutely. We plan to provide full, integrated support for Rails programming in a future release. We’ll soon be publishing a revised Roadmap to give more detail of features in development and our proposed release schedule.

We’ve made much better progress than we’d anticipated with the Ruby debugger for Visual Studio. Initially we had planned the debugger in 0.6 release of Ruby In Steel to take the form of breakpoints plus a ‘code evaluation’ window. In fact, we have come much further than that. It will now include the following features:

• breakpoints
• locals  window
• drag-and-drop watch variables
• call stack
• tracing with step into / step over
• interactive debugging console

This is still some way short of the complete debugging which we have planned. For example, the 0.6 release won’t have conditional breakpoints, ‘drilling down’ into variables or the ability to change the values of variables while debugging; we’ll be adding these features in a later version. Let’s take a quick run through the features it will have…

Breakpoints

Steel lets you add breakpoints to your Ruby programs by clicking in the margin of selected code lines. You can selectively enable/disable selected (or all) breakpoints in this breakpoints window.

Locals

The Locals window automatically monitors and displays the values of local variables

Watch

You can enter the names of variables (or drag and drop variables from the editor window) in the Watch pane

Call Stack

When your code is running several methods deep you can see this instantly in the Call Stack pane

Debug Console

The interactive console not only display the output from the program you are debugging; it also lets you evaluate expressions – for example, enter the name of an object to inspect it or call a specific method to see the return value.

Beta version 0.6 of Ruby In Steel will be available for download from this site by the end of May.

Ah, it’s such a relief to have some decent debugging at last! We are currently working on beta 0.6 of Ruby In Steel (which will be available for download at the end of May). The big new feature in this version is the debugger. Currently this is still in its very early days, so don’t expect to have all the bells and whistles available in C# (yet). We’ll be bolting on a few more bells and whistles in a later version. For now we are integrating the ’standard’ Ruby debugging features. So far we have point-and-click breakpoints and the ability to trace into and over your code using the usual Visual Studio keystrokes. The debug inspection itself is done at an interactive prompt. So, when you hit a breakpoint you can, for example, print or inspect variables and evaluate expressions. Later on we’ll be adding in the usual Visual Studio inspector windows to let you watch and drill down into variables. There’s still a lot of work to be done to get all those goodies added into the mix. For now, though, I am still on a slight high at being able to do visual debugging and tracing of Ruby programs at all…