Any Plans for a StarterKit in IronRuby on CodePlex

Hello,

I am just curious to know about the plans to make IronRuby more
reachable and just to inquire, whether there is any projects already
announced on StarterKits in IronRuby. I think, converting an existing
asp.net starterKit to IronRuby would be a nice option. This way we can
learn more easily.

I know… there is a Book on the way for Ironruby by Manning Publishers,
but it seems to be very far by now. No news about the progress so far.

What are the next as well as immediate plans by Microsoft IronRuby Team,
about teaching IronRuby from Scratch.

Since Ironruby is going to get No.1 .Net Language support like C# and
Vb.Net, can i expect the same level of support.

Thanks

The book will go in early early access program soon. We’re in the
process of
preparing that.
Although the part of the book that will be available won’t be of much
use if
you’re already familiar with Ruby and .NET because it’s just satisfying
the
prerequisites.
I will be posting stuff on my blog and the manning website next week on
how
to leverage various .NET orms from IronRuby.
That should give you an idea of doing interop with your own compiled
classes
etc. I don’t deal with the .NET ORMS in the book itself but rather
with
ActiveRecord from Rails.

I’m sorry but IronRuby is quite a young project and writing a book does
take
time :slight_smile:

What would be topics of particular interest to you?

my blog: http://flanders.co.nz/blog

hth
Ivan

hi!

On same topic, what you see as primary scenario(s) for IronRuby use.
Silverlight programming, general web app programming (means ASP.NET,
RoR(?),
…), windows forms apps, porting code written in Ruby to .NET, …

interested in hearing your thoughts :wink:

thanks,
Slavo.

Well I quit my job to be able to spend more time on Silverlight and
IronRuby
as a consultant because I think that one takes the cake :slight_smile:
I think that most people will go to IronRuby to have something like
RubyOnRails.NET (IronRubyOnRails).

I personally like Ruby best for the web and for automating my common
desktop
tasks, using Rake as a replacement for msbuild or nant.
Once you get the hang of Ruby you can do so much more in a day than you
could with a language like say C#.

One of the things I’m looking forward to, is to be able to use rspec and
mocha as my unit test framework instead of one out the plethora of c#
ones.
Mocking becomes so much easier with ruby, where in C# i have it
associated
with pain.

I’m coming from a .NET background before I did ruby, so I’ll be probably
most inclined to find a good balance between using what’s there from the
ruby community and what’s in the .NET framework. To use an empty term
the
best tool for the job.

I’m also looking forward to getting a bunch of nice dsl’s around .NET
libraries etc.

I’ll probably use it for most things I come across. IronRuby code
executes
slower than C# code which will be one of the objections you get.
But I think that in most webapps for example the performance bottleneck
is
the way the data is handled.Because typically you’re doing things on a
per
request basis and most of the operations aren’t that computational
intensive
at all, the difference isn’t that bad. And if needs be you can always
perform those tasks that need that extra bit of performance in a
statically
compiled assembly.

It’s hard to tell what will actually happen because using IronRuby for
webforms programming should make that model also very attractive.
Especially
for ASP.NET developers from today because they won’t need to learn a new
framework and mindset they can happily stick with viewstate, css control
adapters and controls.

Another thing that interests me is how I would be able to leverage the
ASP.NET MVC Framework because as a personal preference I like that one
the
best for doing MVC because almost no choices have been made for me.
Where
other people will find a more opionated framework more suitable for
their
taste.

I think IronRuby and WPF is also a winner but not as much as Silverlight
is.

I’d like to see everybody switching to ironruby :wink:

Hi Ivan,

Thanks for informing us about the status.

Its nice to know that you are considering about Active Record as an ORM
in your book. Thats the best idea and i do support it.

Informing a bit about DataMapper would also be nice, since MERB is going
to support 3 ORM’s and Datamapper is one of them.

It would be nice if you can focus and write few pages on LinQ to SQL
with IronRuby in your book.

All the codes i have seen so far have mainly covered C#, and few of them
with Vb.Net. So far i have not seen a single example with Ironruby.

I know that IronRuby is still in alpha stage, but something should be
ready by now, which can show atleast a single example in LinQ to SQL
with IronRuby.

I think, more opinions will flow in, from this forum.

Thanks

Hi Ivan,

Sorry… I missed to mention in my previous thread.

It would be nice if you will kindly consider to show few examples of
connections with MySql as well.

Since IIS 7 will support PHP and MySQL, it would be great to show how
IronRuby works with MySQl. Since many classic Ruby developers would be
having a ready made database in MySql, they would rather prefer to stick
to MySQL.

MS SQL Server would be the other option for them.

In short we get best of both the worlds,when it comes to database.

Thanks

Ivan Porto C.:

But I think that in most webapps for example the performance
bottleneck is the way the data is handled.Because typically you’re
doing things on a per request basis and most of the operations aren’t
that computational intensive at all, the difference isn’t that bad.
And if needs be you can always perform those tasks that need that
extra bit of performance in a statically compiled assembly.

A couple of points here:

  1. If you s/performance/efficiency/ you’ll see the problem from a
    different light. Server virtualization and power efficiency are becoming
    things that lots of folks are concerned with these days. So while
    optimizing latency may not be important due to being IO bound, doing
    more with the CPU cycles that are available and the energy cost per CPU
    cycle is becoming more and more important, especially as sites grow.

  2. A statically compiled assembly won’t necessarily buy you better
    performance. Certainly not today. So I think that you still need to
    think about efficiency vs. latency / perf.

I think IronRuby and WPF is also a winner but not as much as
Silverlight is.

+1 on the Silverlight comment. I think this is a place where we can do
things that most other implementations cannot. We will have reasonably
broad reach of SL by the end of this year, which is the base platform
for running IronRuby in the browser. Now what folks will actually do
with Ruby in the browser is something that I would love to spin up a
discussion around. Thoughts are welcome here.

Thanks,
-John

Hi

The rubyists already know how to connect to mysql don’t they :). Because
IronRuby will support everything MRI supports that means that the
ruby-dbi
library should also work on IronRuby. And in that case there are plenty
of
tutorials on the web that actually show that. I do want to show new
things
in the book and not stuff that is ubiquitous on the web or available in
20
other books.
That being said I had planned to talk about DataMapper and Sequel as
ruby
ORM’s and probably very briefly mention that there is rBatis an iBatis
implementation in Ruby. I’ll see how I can work Linq2Sql in. But if I’m
going to show Linq2Sql that would probably mean generating the Linq2Sql
classes in C# and then using that assembly from your code. Because at
this
time IronRuby doesn’t support custom attributes and I believe Linq2Sql
needs
those for it’s metadata. I haven’t properly looked into Linq2Sql yet
except
for a demo I did a couple of months ago.

I’m mostly interested in having a DBI provider, based on ADO.NET that
would
mean you get an almost drop in replacement for most exisiting ruby
applications by just changing the connection string and for rails by
creating a new client adapter that understands the ADO.NET connection
string.
Or do you mean leveraging the ADO.NET providers directly ?

For me this is perfect time to have this discussion on which data access
people are interested in because this is what I’ll be writing about
next.
It makes my job easier when I get feedback so I know what is really of
interest to the community instead of guessing for it :slight_smile:

Thanks
Ivan

Rahil K. wrote:

Hi,

It would be great to have a small and working starter kit with Asp.Net
MVC with IronRuby, from one of those currently available starter kits
for C# and Vb.net.


Hi,

Nice to see the old popular thread emerging once again, and perhaps well
in time.

I would suggest the most popular Classified Starter Kit, which is
running almost everywhere on the net in C# and Vb versions.

It would be great to have a kit like this, specially with Asp.Net MVC in
IronRuby.

Lets hope that the prayers are heard by the masters.

The potential problem to this would be that the starter kits are based
on webforms, as such porting them to MVC and IronRuby would be a big
task without much benefit?

Personally, I’m not a great fan of massive starter kit projects as
they trend to take too long to get your head around. Plus they are
pretty boring I imagine to implement.

I would much prefer to see simple well focused examples of how to use
IronRuby + MVC in the form of blog posts or articles. This might
include a comparison of how it would be done using C#. Then, when you
wanted to find out certain bits of information you could easily search
for articles instead of a massive codebase which might not include
what your after, and even if it does - without an explication.

Ben
Blog.BenHall.me.uk

Hi,

It would be great to have a small and working starter kit with Asp.Net
MVC with IronRuby, from one of those currently available starter kits
for C# and Vb.net.

Since Asp.Net MVC preview 4 supports IronRuby, there is nothing wrong in
expecting some working solutions to learn more.