Building upon the previous article introducing IronRuby, this article explores how to work with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) within IronRuby. In addition to a detailed example of an IronRuby WPF sample application, others areas covered include event handling, working with XAML, inheriting from CLR classes, and reducing verbosity in IronRuby code.
Last week Miguel de Icaza published a long post listing all the work the Mono team at Novell has been doing since the move to GitHub in July 2010. Much of the new work has been around language development and MonoDevelop improvements.
Since Microsoft announced that it was giving up control of its Iron languages, there has been a quiet debate on where to host the project. The negotiations have finally been settled and the winner is Github for source control and CodePlex for issue tracking.
Jason Zander has announced that Microsoft will be turning over IronPython and IronRuby to Miguel de Icaza of Novell/Mono and former IronRuby lead Jimmy Schementi. Jimmy left Microsoft in July to join Lab49. IronPython will have two additional coordinators: Michael Foord, co-author of IronPython in Action and IronPython MVP Jeff Hardy.
IronRuby is Microsoft's implementation of the Ruby language we all know and love with the added bonus of interoperability with the .NET framework. It's supported by the .NET Common Language Runtime as well as, albeit unofficially, the Mono project. This article gives an introduction to IronRuby, and discusses how to run Rails applications in IronRuby as well as potential issues to look out for.
One of the more interesting announcements recently coming to the Ruby community was the release of JetBrains RubyMine IDE for Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications. The Ruby community is known for not typically using an integrated development environment (IDE) such as .NET or Java developers use. Ruby developers usually stick to plain text editors such as TextMate, Vim and Emacs.
A misconception lingers in the Ruby world: Ruby has no debugger. This is blatantly wrong - Ruby has debuggers, GUIs for debuggers and APIs for debuggers. InfoQ takes a close look at the state of debugging tools in the Ruby world - and finds that its debugging support is more than sufficient.
Ben Hall shows how Ruby testing tools can help with .NET and ASP.NET development and takes a look at RSpec, Webrat, Cucumber, Selenium and others. Also: a peek at using IronRuby for testing .NET apps.
A look at the different Ruby virtual machines (JRuby, MagLev, IronRuby, Rubinius, MacRuby) and how to choose what fits best within the enterprise.
At RubyFringe John Lam talks about his path to dynamic languages, some of the problems of making IronRuby run fast, and how the DLR helps with implementing languages.
JRuby project lead Charles Nutter discusses how he got involved with JRuby, Sun's involvement with JRuby, how JRuby fits into enterprise-level web applications, the possibility of a friendly fork of the OpenJDK source code, reasons for switching to JRuby, the future of JRuby, Spring and JRuby, and the Ruby community as a whole.
