The MountainWest RubyConf 2008 is upon us just 2 weeks away in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to be there given my travel with The Code Trip.  IronRuby, however, was able to be a sponsor of this year's conference as a Gold Sponsor.  This sponsorship is one part that enables video production of the conference for afterwards as well as a few other things.  The organizers have done a great job getting great sponsors to make this happen, and IronRuby is grateful to be a part of that. One thing that was recently released was...

John Lam just announced that the Dynamic Silverlight bits are now available.  What that does is enable you to write code targeting Silverlight in Ruby (IronRuby) or Python (IronPython). The Dynamic Silverlight bits are implemented as Silverlight extensions which means that they will be downloaded on an as-needed basis.  The additional download is currently about 712KB download in size.  If you are interested in looking at running Ruby in the client on the desktop in addition to if you are running Ruby on the server, this might be of interest to you.  Check it out and some of John's tutorials...

the guys at sapphire, whom i'd previously written about their ruby in steel developer tools, just posted a preview of 'visual rails workbench,' which is a visual designer for ruby on rails.  here's one of their preview shots: this design mode with ERb is just one of the elements of the workbench it looks like.  get the full details (as well as some comments on IronRuby support in their other tools that they've been working on) by reading the update on the sapphire site. tags: ruby, rails, ruby on rails, ror, rails ide, saphhire, sapphire in steel, visual rails workbench, rails...

i recently got an email from a rails developer who was using silverlight on a site to display high-quality media.  what?! you though silverlight was a windows-only technology? blasphemy!  you see, silverlight is a client-technology, which means as long as it can be served up to the browser (and the user has the plugin), the server can be your own custom version of l337hax0r web edition or whatever.  now, there are advantages of using internet information services on windows and some integration with asp.net, but that's not what this post is about.  on to the issue at hand will you... so...

the guys over at sapphiresteel software released ruby in steel text edition, a full-featured ruby on rails IDE built on the visual studio 2008 shell. as a microsoft developer interested in looking at ruby on rails early on, i loved when the sapphire project was first released.  i had played with earlier version and after re-paving my machine need to take a look at the updated versions. if you don't own a copy of visual studio 2008, when you get the ruby in steel text edition, you get visual studio 2008 (ruby language support only) -- so this isn't an add-on...

found a new site a while back and forgot to share.  all you ruby-ists or bi-curious .net developers (technical bi-curious that is) should head on over to rubydoes.net and subscribe.  they promise to keep an eye on all things ironruby for us :-).  from their site: We think Ruby is great, but we also think .net is great. Together, IronRuby could prove to be quite a compelling offering that geeks all over the world will love. nice.  subscribed. tags: ironruby , ruby , ruby on rails , rubydoes.net , ironpython

okay, now in a session for php developers -- or maybe rails developers...don't know yet. this session is from simon minnee from silverstripe, a cms solution provider.  simon quickly adds this disclaimer: this presentation is not intended to be a language war.  he admits that he is a novice with regard to Rails versus what he's presenting, etc.  de admits, in fact, that his understanding is naive.  he says "i just thought the title would be edgy.  forgive me." hmm...clever simon, clever -- got me in the door. he talks about their choice using PHP over...

as seen on facebook... "John [Lam] is VERY pleased with the performance of dynamic sites in Ruby." (13 JUL 2007) see you at OSCON next week :-) tags: ironruby, ruby on rails, ruby, ironpython, dlr, dynamic language runtime, silverlight, oscon

i chose not to attend technically the first day of railsconf which was some pre-con tutorials.  why?  well, last year i did, and didn't find them a particular valuable use of 8 hours of my time...probably because in conference mode i'm not in a mindset of sitting for 4 hours on one topic. but i'm here back in portland, this time for railsconf (my last trip was oscon...man was it really that long ago?) as well as the portland code camp (where i have a few sessions).  there are a few of us softie-types here at railsconf, so if you...

scottgu just announced microsoft is providing a ruby implementation for .net...nice. before mix i had a chance to sit down with john lam, a program manager at microsoft working on the dynamic language runtime that was announced at mix07.  i went to seattle and carved off a moment to talk with him as they prepared for mix07.  i've put the recording up on my *cast site for you to view/listen to.  some interesting things he talks about and how happy he is to finally break his silence.  in the middle, the small edit you'll see is when his office-mate, tomas...

well, some pretty good news coming out of mix07 today...here's a quick recap... release of Silverlight 1.0 beta supporting ajax/javascript release of Silverlight 1.1 alpha supporting .net programming model announcing cross-platform (windows/mac) .net as a part of Silverlight 1.1 alpha announcing support for dynamic languages (ruby, python out of the gate) as a part of Silverlight 1.1 alpha rtm of expression studio preview of expression blend v2 (supporting richer Silverlight development) expression media encoder preview for Silverlight Silverlight streaming by Windows Live whew, that is a lot to swallow.  i'm most excited...