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.
got an email today about something i hadn't seen yet, another silverlight 2.0 game, Pirates! cameron emailed me about a cool prototype he's working on with the farseer engine. here's a shot:
as cameron puts it:
"The goal of the game will be to attain the buried fortune of a long dead pirate named Rough Hand James. He created a map to his treasure and scattered the pieces all across the globe. It will be your adventure to find those map pieces and locate the treasure. You will start out on your ship with the first clue to the treasure and along the way you may encounter the Royal Navy, sea monsters and other pirates. You will engage in sea and land battles, loot merchant vessels and follow clues through towns, uncharted waters and wilderness all to find the greatest fortune every massed by one pirate."
awesome...'rough hand james' -- nice. check out cameron's blog to follow some of the interesting things he's finding along the way with both silverlight as well as creating some artificial intelligence for gaming. i can't wait to see what cameron thinks of silverlight 2.0!
today, the iis team released a preview of the 'web deployment tool' for internet information services (iis). the tool has features that a lot of server admins would want such as deployment assistance, sync/migration of sites across servers (which includes config, content, certs, etc.).
the core features are:
- synchronization and snapshot of IIS 6/7
- migration from iis 6
- analysis of iis 6 installed features
- troubleshooting and validation features
go check out the post for all the details and a download link.
gizmodo reports (and i confirm the link...although everyone is downloading it now so it is sloooowww) that the samsung sgh-i607 aka blackjack now has a windows mobile 6 update available.
one disappointment (for me at least) is that the updater doesn't work on vista. argh. gotta find me an XP box now.
the leaders of the arizona .net user group have convinced scott guthrie that phoenix is nice in march (and it is...spring training baby!) and he should visit. they've organized a super user group meeting and you can find information on when/where here. it will be hosted at scottsdale center for the arts, which is a pretty killer facility. i'd recommend carpooling and not messing with the no parking signs (those scottsdale folks like to watch those meters).
having ScottGu come to phoenix immediately after MIX08 is a great thing for the community. if you couldn't make it to MIX, you'll be able to see some new things from scott in what no doubt will be an exciting, new and learning experience. there are some great things coming out of his group at MIX and this event in phoenix is a must see. i'm sure he'll cover some great new web stuff, updates on silverlight and we'll all be enlightened by how he still manages to stay close to the code while serving a growing army in the developer division! be sure to block your calendar now!
i know scott won't be able to cover everything, so we'll ensure that the code trip will cover some of the gaps. be sure to subscribe to the feed to know when we'll be coming back through phoenix -- we'll be updating it soon!
