The first public alpha of our IronRuby IDE is now available for free
download. This includes our IronRuby form designer with drag+drop
controls, properties panel, syntax coloring, code collapsing, code
formatting, bracket matching, keyword…end matching, project setup
wizards, project management in the solution explorer etc. It does not
currently include debugging or IntelliSense.
You can read about its features and limitations on the download page:
Have been playing with that for a while and feels really decent for an
“alpha” version
Since we IronRuby early adopters are “living on the bleeding edge”,
there might be quite a few (including our company) that are more
interested in WPF GUI:s (preverably with XAML, but possibly without)
instead of the older Windows Forms. I am curious about Sapphire Steels
plans / opinions on feasibility of combining WPF/XAML support their
tool?
I have myself a working proto of an application with WPF/XAML defined
GUI:s and IronRuby event-handlers implemented as proxy-objects for the
MSBuild-generated WPF Widget classes. While this approach works, it is
not optimally elegant since the event handler methods are not
first-class members of the widget classes. But we could not take the
approach of extending the WPF-classes as IronRuby-classes because of our
heavy reliance of XAML that refers to other XAML-defined custom classes:
Robert B.
Software architect
Napa Ltd
Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki FI-00180
P.O.Box 470, Helsinki FI-00181
Thanks for the comments, Robert. In principle, WPF support is not
difficult and as a general rule we plan to ‘move forward’ with Ruby In
Steel. Currently, our alpha product is very basic (though I’m pleased to
hear you say that it doesn’t seem so!) - and, really, we are waiting for
a few more iterations of IronRuby development before going too far
ahead. So things such as WPF, debugging and IntelliSense will have to
wait till later.
We actually have implemented some IntelliSense already but we turned it
off for the alpha release as it is by no means yet as good as the
IntelliSense in our standard product. We felt it was worth waiting until
IronRuby itself was a bit more mature before putting effort into
supporting the full range of features and technologies that you would
expect in the finished product.
Thanks for donating such a great IDE for IronRuby.
P.S.:- you should announce this here, to gain more mileage, since
IronRuby on Google G. is still growing, with limited members.
SoftMind.
Thanks for the interest. Sorry if I didn’t make it clear. Yes, our
IronRuby IDE is not just free now (in alpha). We intend to make the
“Ruby In Steel Personal Edition For IronRuby” a free product even after
the final version of IronRuby is released.
If I’m not announcing this in the right groups to let those people with
an interest in IronRuby know about this, please feel free to spread the
word
I understand that you habe suppled few sample codes for IronRuby as
follows
C:\Program Files\SapphireSteel Software\Ruby In Steel\v1.0\Samples
Is it possible to get a separate download to study those codes.
I could do, I guess. But I’m not sure that the code without the IDE
would be all that interesting Install the IDE, on the other hand,
and the code will spring into life… !
Also bear in mind that the ‘code behind’ (the file that defines the
layout and wires up events) will change once we have incorporate
IronRuby’s delegation mechanism which is not (or anyway was not?)
available for this iteration of the IDE. Incidentallly, the full
download is not that big (about 7MB). That gives you all the software
you need to install the IronRuby IDE into a standard copy of VS2008.
The download only gets big if you also need a free copy of VS2008 (the
‘VS Shell’) into which to install the IronRuby IDE. For that you will
have to download the installer for the TextEdition of Ruby In Steel, use
that to install VS itself (but uncheck the option to install the
TextEdition) then subsequently install the IronRuby IDE. This installer
is about 170MB - but you only need that if you haven’t already got a
copy of VS2008.
Install the IDE, on the other hand,