Just a quick note, one of people I am writing the Professional IronRuby book with, Aaron Junod, was on the ALT.NET Podcast recently talking about The State of IronRuby.   Aaron and Michael Letterle talk with Mike Moore about:

• Why Ruby?
• Dynamic Typing
• How Ruby has affected the industry
• Microsoft accepting community contributions
• What about running IronRuby on Rails?
• What about running IronRuby on the ASP.NET MVC?
• Sneaking Ruby into the enterprise with IronRuby
• IronRuby?s readiness
• Ruby Programming Language
• try ruby!

Please give it a listen.

UPDATE: I had the chance to talk with Ivan about IronNails.  Please read the interview over on InfoQ.

As we see IronRuby make progress within Microsoft, we are also seeing new projects pop-up as well.  One such project I have noticed and wanted to share is IronNails, created and opensourced by Ivan Porto Carrero.  IronNails brings IronRuby and Silverlight together implementing an MVC pattern, much like Ruby on Rails.

IronNails
=========

IronNails is a framework inspired by the Rails and rucola frameworks. It offers a rails-like way of developing
applications with IronRuby and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
This framework uses the pattern Model – ViewModel – View – Controller (M-VM-V-C). It should be able to run on both WPF
and Silverlight.

The idea is that the views can be created using a design tool like Blend for example and just save that xaml as is. The
designer should not need to use anything else than drag and drop to create a GUI design. The behaviors are then added to
the view by using predefined behaviors in the framework or by defining your own behavior.
The framework then generates a proxy for the view which will be used to transparently wire up the commands in the
behaviors to controller actions.

IronNails is in its infancy and is showing some good promise.   Follow the announcement on Ivan’s blog for more details and future updates.

I have been doing a lot of C# development over the years and it has been my primary language since the days of C and C++ coding.  I started working with Ruby for the past couple years doing personal projects and some client work too.  It was an experience to learn Ruby after so long with C-type languages.

Unfortunately I did not have CodeThinked to help me out.  I discovered a great set of tutorials which show how to setup IronRuby and learn it based on what you know as a C# developer.

There are currently 6 separate posts up covering everything from getting from source, building and running Ruby applications to learning Ruby by comparing to constructs in C#.  Great stuff!

• Getting IronRuby Up and Running
• Running Applications in IronRuby
• Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 1
• Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 2 
• Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 3 
• Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 4

Give them a read and start writing some Ruby.

it is official, Professional IronRuby published by Wrox/Wiley is finally looking like it is a real thing.  A fellow developer noticed this on the Amazon web site and passed on to me today.  I was not even aware it was up yet.

Aaron and I have a third author, Dan Bernier,  so this book cover will change a bit.  I always seem to look grumpy when I get photos taken, maybe I don’t like my pictures taken.

John Lam announced on his blog that the IronRuby team has successfully processed some simple requests with an unmodified copy of Rails.  The plan is to show off this achievement at RailsConf this week.

Congratulations to the team for many accomplishments in a short amount of time:

We started our work on IronRuby back in February 2007. Now, just 15 months later, we?ve reached what others are calling the ?Rails Singularity?. A few folks claimed that we would never get here this quickly, or that we wouldn?t be allowed to accomplish this goal. But we did it on our own, in our own way and with help from our community. And we?re just getting started.

I have always maintained that you must judge us based on our actions and not our words. Running Rails shows that we are serious when we say that we are going to create a Ruby that runs real Ruby programs. And there isn?t any a more real Ruby program than Rails. This demonstrates that we?re true to the language, and that we?ve put compatibility above all else on our TODO lists.

This is great news for the alternative Ruby implementations and getting IronRuby into the mainstream.  I blogged about what I feel is the win for developers with milestones like this in the past.

John indicates there is still a lot to do but the future is bright:

Our performance is nowhere near where we expect it to be, particularly in startup of a large application like Rails. We are consuming much more memory than we would like to. But this is the price you pay when you put compatibility ahead of all other work. We?ve shown that we are willing to do what it takes to run Rails. Now we have to do the work to make it run better, and faster.

RailsConf should be a real bustle with the alternative Ruby implementations consisting or IronRuby, Rubinius and JRuby.  This is good for all of the Ruby developers out there and getting our applications running on many different operating systems and language runtimes.

Curious about Microsoft’s IronRuby implementation?  Try it out in your browser.

I have been developing Ruby applications for the past couple years, not as my only work but part of my overall work.  The IronRuby project is a large part of my  work as well, not as a committer, but from a consumer standpoint.  I am looking forward to the day where we can run Ruby on Rails on IronRuby and therefore IIS.  I also use IronRuby for the book I am working on with a friend for Wrox Press, which I talked about previously.

I have always been a Windows developer and use Windows systems for all of my daily work.   This change in the past year when I jumped on the Apple Mac bandwagon and started using a MacBook Pro.  I have to say I really love it from a hardware perspective as well as from the perspective of the usability of OSX, it is just a pleasure.

This leads me to the reason for this post, getting IronRuby to build and run on a Mac under Mono.

Mono

The first part of getting IronRuby to run on the Mac is to install Mono.  Mono is needed to have a .NET 2.0 available on the Mac, its current version at the time of this writing is 1.9.1.  The download for the Mac is a Universal DMG Image extracting to a PKG which you just double-click and install, pretty straight forward.

I followed much of Seo Sanghyeon’s brief tutorial on the details of IronRuby on Mono but needed to make some adjustments to actually get it to work on my system.  For example, I did NOT install Mono from source, I used the pre-built package.

IronRuby Source

The IronRuby team is constantly make changes to the source and not all revisions are compatible with this built process.  I am sure as we get closer to release there will be more stable base of code.  For right now we are on Revision 100, so the Subversion command to get the source looks like this:

svn co -r 100 http://ironruby.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk ironruby

IronRuby Build Process

The build process is where it gets a little tricky to make sure everything is lined up.  The first thing is changing to the directory where IronRuby source is located:

cd ironruby

A patch needs to be applied for Rake to work properly.  The patch can be found on Seo’s web site here, notice it is build revision specific and new ones will likely be available.  Next up run Patch:

patch -p0 < patch-mono-r100

The next step was the key to my success, telling the Mono compiler where the needed libraries are located.  The build would never work without it.

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Libraries/pkgconfig/"

This export I put in my ~/.bash_profile file and closed and reopened my Terminial window.  Next, run Rake:

rake compile mono=1

If all goes well the build will succeed, with likely some warnings, and you can run IronRuby:

mono build/mono_debug/ir.exe

You should see a nice prompt showing a happy IronRuby interpreter running.

Conclusion

The process to get IronRuby on the Mac under Mono is pretty straightforward and will likely get easier.  The key for me getting this to work was how great the community is around IronRuby.  The members of the IronRuby-Core mailing list do such a great job.

Aaron Junod, my co-author of Professional IronRuby I talked about already, did a great interview with John Lam at the recent MIX conference in Las Vegas.  Aaron asked some great questions and as always John answered them very openly giving all those IronRuby enthusiasts something to look forward to.

The interview covers a lot, including:

• IronRuby
• Microsoft and Open Source
• Microsoft working with Open Source developer community
• Future of IronRuby and the Microsoft dynamic languages

Please check out the interview with John Lam at the RubyDoes.NET web site.

I finally found a bit of time to blog about a book I am writing with a friend of mine, Aaron Junod.  You may be familiar with Aaron from the RubyDoes.NET web site.  The title of the book is, you guessed it, Professional IronRuby and is being published by Wrox/Wiley Press.  The topic is of course, IronRuby.  Since the RTM of IronRuby will likely be the end of the year you should see the book in stores in the November time frame.

I don’t really know what made me take the plunge to write a book let along strive for a good.  I have enjoyed writing on the blog here and also for InfoQ which I am both a .NET and Ruby editor, so I guess the topic of Ruby on .NET really made sense to me.  I will post an image of the book cover once we have it, which will contain the usual author photos.  Yes, you get to see my ugly mug.

The goal of the book will be to discuss Ruby on .NET, not be an introduction to Ruby.  We will take the time to give a short overview of Ruby, an overview which will be enough for experienced .NET developers to know how to create the same constructs in IronRuby as they do in their native .NET language of choice.  We will discuss all of those things important to developers interested in exploring and creating great applications using dynamic language.

Draft Table of Contents

We are fortunate enough to have our Forward written by John Lam, I can’t think of a better person.  The Table of Contents below is just a draft and may change based on additional items added to IronRuby later in the year.

• Chapter 1 – Introduction to IronRuby?
• Chapter 2 – Getting Started with IronRuby
• Chapter 3 – Introduction to Ruby 
• Chapter 4 – Objects
• Chapter 5 – Conditional statements and flow control
• Chapter 6 – Working with Files and Databases
• Chapter 7 – Reflection and meta programming
• Chapter 8 – Testing in Ruby
• Chapter 9 – The Ruby Universe
• Chapter 10 ? Running Ruby on Rails
• Chapter 11 ? Creating Ruby on Rails Applications
• Chapter 12 – Working with .NET classes/libraries from IronRuby
• Chapter 13 – Working with WPF from IronRuby
• Chapter 14 – Ruby and ASP.NET
• Chapter 15 – Ruby and Silverlight
• Chapter 16 – Calling IronRuby Code from .NET
• Chapter 17 – Hosting IronRuby and the DLR in your application
• Chapter 18 – A tour of the IronRuby source code, how the magic happens
• Chapter 19 – Porting Ruby libraries to IronRuby
• Chapter 20 – IronRuby and Mono

I would be interested to hear some feedback on what topic details readers might want to see in the book that either I have not mentioned or as a suggestion to include in the chapter topics I listed.

I am really looking forward to the whole experience.  So many people write books and say they will never do it again.  I am certainly not doing for the money but instead, the experience.  Writing this book so far has been eye-opening to the publishing process as well as gotten us closer to the Dynamic Language team and seeing the development of this important technology a bit closer than we normally would have.

John Lam recently demonstrated some great advancements the IronRuby team made by showing IronRuby on Silverlight at the recent RubyConf.

This is important as being the first demo of code-first Silverlight but it also lets us look forward to running Ruby in the browser.  John make this claim himself and it is exciting news:

Unfortunately, you can’t run these bits yet. We’re using a private build of Silverlight to run this stuff today. But once we (DLR) sync up with the next CTP of Silverlight, you’ll be able to run IronRuby in your browser. Fun times.

You can catch more information on John’s blog and see the code yourself.  I look forward to getting these bits and seeing how the hard work has paid off.