Mike M. wrote:
I think you *need *an IDE like Visual Studio for writing ASP.NET MVC web
apps because ASP.NET MVC is a web framework written for C#. Even if you
use
a different language like Python or Ruby.
Hi Mike,
Just Curious, what makes you say that Asp.Net MVC is a framework written
for C# only. I think its for all 4 languages working with .Net (
C#,Vb.Net, IronRuby and Ironpython and very soon F# as the fifth
language )
Whats IronRuby community suppose to do, if VS 2008 does not support
IronRuby and IronPython…?
Does MSFT / DLR Team, really think that VS2008 is a must for C# and
Vb.Net only…?
Rahil K. wrote:
Josh C. wrote:
I have to agree with Mike here. Ruby development with TextMate (a
text editor only) works wonderfully, but I would be hesitant to
develop C# applications in the same way.
On the other hand, one thing that will be really nice is to have a
debugger that works easily, and at least similar to the one in Visual
Studio.
Majority of IronRuby developers will be using Ironruby for web designing
purpose, and working with Asp.Net MVC with IronRuby, a good IDE like VS
Express is a must.
For a plain Ruby development even “Scite” and “Netbeans 6.1” are the
best choice around. Even NotePad can solve that problem, but its hardly
used.
But when it comes to Asp.Net MVC with IronRuby, one cannot survive
without a great IDE, thats sure.
There are aspects of Ruby that make IDE’s both far more complicated and
far more useful. Consider working with ActiveRecord. There’s no
denying that it would be nice to have Intellisense-like autocompletion
for your AR objects if, for example, you forgot the name of one of your
fields. (Sure you can keep a schema file open if you have 3 tables, but
what if you have 50). And is the method you are looking for a field in
the table, a method in the class, or base class, or a method added by a
module, or worse a method that was monkey-patched in.
I suppose you could keep a script/console running to query such things,
but certainly its faster to have that information immediately in editor.
I’ve never worked on an IDE before, but the topic of how you implement
Intellisense for Ruby has always interested me. I imagine it must be
100x harder to do it for Ruby than for C++ (or maybe just use 100x more
processing power). But I’m thinking that the DLR must make such things
much easier. Is that the case?
As much as I hate to, I would have to agree that IDE support for
IronRuby
with other .NET applications is a necessity. I’ve tried to do MVC
development in TextMate and I can say it’s very difficult. Not from an
IntelliSense perspective, I can live without that, but building your
code &
creating the web.config and other necessary files is made far more
difficult
by not having IDE support.
Along those lines, I feel the need to mention that MS has already said
they
are not going to be marketing IronRuby at all. They will put it out
there
and it will be up to us to market it. It’s usage will depend on coming
up
with valid use cases for Ruby. ASP.NET MVC with IR is a great example.
However, companies that already have an investment in C# or VB will
likely
stick with that.
-Joe
On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 10:27 AM, Softmind T.
[email protected]
Curtis Mitchell wrote:
- IMO, most .NET developers know very little about Ruby and even less
about
IronRuby right now.
Hi Curtis,
I totally agree with you. I have checked with many .Net developers and
very few are aware of IronRuby. IronPython 2.0 has reached beta 2.0
stage and yet its not promoted by DLR team.
I have observed that Microsoft is in no mood to promote IronRuby at all.
There are hardly few blogs seen regarding IronRuby and whatever blogs i
have seen are from IronRuby lovers and contributors.
Asp.Net team has ignored many requests of starting a section for
IronRuby on Asp.Net Forums
On one hand they invite experts like Jim and John to work for Ironpython
and IronRuby, and on the other hand they ignore/waste their efforts by
not promoting it.
All i smell is something fishy in the case of DLR languages.
Having used C# since it came out, which I still feel is simply a more
Microsoft-supported Java (the syntax is different but the
flavor/approach is
right there) I find ruby very refreshing. I will still use C# when I
need to
and am very proficient in it, but if IronRuby keeps the spirit of
metaprogramming alive in its implementation I think folks who take the
time
to really learn it will adopt ruby in a heartbeat as their primary
language.
There are always those who go kicking and screaming to a new
language/platform - I’m not talking about you :).
-Jayme
Most corporate .NET developers live with their heads in the sand.
IronRuby/Python are for a niche set of higher-level and often
multi-platform
developers, not your everyday “mort” which we find all too often.
These developers often use VS IDE as a crutch instead of understanding
the
underlying libraries. The .NET framework is huge so this is tough to do
BUT
those who have been working with Ruby get used to the TextMate style of
coding and it works. Once you are competant in the base Ruby libraries
you
are very efficient using TextMate.
I am sure once Silverlight DLR and IronRuby is fully baked then we will
see
MS promote it better but it will never be a C#, simply for the mort
factor.
-Rob B.
On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 11:09 AM, Softmind T.
[email protected]
Joe F. wrote:
Along those lines, I feel the need to mention that MS has already said
they
are not going to be marketing IronRuby at all. They will put it out
there
and it will be up to us to market it.
Hi Joe,
Very sad news indeed. I always had the same feeling about IronRuby being
neglected badly by MSFT.
Can you kindly post that link here that says “MS shall not be marketing
IronRuby at all.”
Mr John L., What do you have to say here…?
I am not dragging you in this conversation, just hoping you can focus
and clear few doubts about the future of IronRuby with MS.
I have to agree with Mike here. Ruby development with TextMate (a
text editor only) works wonderfully, but I would be hesitant to
develop C# applications in the same way.
It ain’t so shabby in “e” either (TextMate clone for Windows) 
Majority of IronRuby developers will be using Ironruby for web designing
purpose, and working with Asp.Net MVC with IronRuby, a good IDE like VS
Express is a must.
I don’t know about this, I see a BIG future in IronRuby for scripting
business logic written in other .NET languages. Developing DSLs for
existing business logic that is already existing.
As much as I hate to, I would have to agree that IDE support for IronRuby
with other .NET applications is a necessity. I’ve tried to do MVC
development in TextMate and I can say it’s very difficult. Not from an
IntelliSense perspective, I can live without that, but building your code &
creating the web.config and other necessary files is made far more difficult
by not having IDE support.
That’s what TextMate bundles are for!
As for IronRuby being ignored by MS… I’m not sure about that, there’s
been
alot of sexy Silverlight demos I’ve seen using IronRuby both by MSers
and
non MSers. But I don’t think they’re really going to consider pushing
it
until it hits a 1.0 release, IR still needs quite a bit of work.
I suppose from the MSFT perspective, the IronX projects are a shot at
doing
something (mostly) community-driven. In a sense, marketing IronRuby or
IronPython is a double-edge sword for MSFT. On one hand, the languages
are
bringing some great features to the .NET platform as a whole, but on the
other hand, learning them will also increase a developer’s ability (and
possibly likeliness) to jump from .NET to Matz Ruby or CPython. When
you
consider (my assumption) that Ruby and Python programmers aren’t as
spirited
about becoming .NET programmers, it’s easier to justify MSFT’s
reluctance to
market these projects.
Aside from that controversial argument I just invented, the success of
these
projects really depend on us, the community.
The Silverlight Machine will bring some adopters, but even those people
will
read our blogs and forum posts before taking the leap from C#.
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ryan Belcher
I’ve never worked on an IDE before, but the topic of how you
implement Intellisense for Ruby has always interested me. I
imagine it must be 100x harder to do it for Ruby than for C++
(or maybe just use 100x more processing power). But I’m
thinking that the DLR must make such things much easier. Is
that the case?
This is really a language-specific parsing issue and is therefore
outside the realm of the DLR.
The most basic approach for Intellisense is to extract the information
from the ASTs, which I imagine is all that C# or VB have to do. The
next is to take the ASTs and transform them by removing the “dangerous”
parts. Then, you could actually run the simplified ASTs and introspect
on the resulting object. This can be made increasingly “complete” by
removing less and less stuff – at greater and greater risk of creating
a program that won’t run to completion or will have undesirable side
effects.
To put this another way, I may need to run “initialize” in order for my
object to express the proper methods – but the code in “initialize”
could well overwrite the OS for all I know.
Any class that depends on method_missing (in Ruby) or getattr (in
Python) for method implementation is going to be problematic for
Intellisense. And Rails’ ActiveRecord is one of the most pathological
cases I can imagine.
–
Curt H.
[email protected]
We think that there’s more than enough value on the .NET platform to
retain developers.
Quite frankly, if you’re looking to write Ruby or Python code that
doesn’t take advantage of .NET features (such as cross-language
interoperability, Windows Forms, WPF or Silverlight) then you’re
probably better off using the original “C” implementation of those
languages – and we have no interest in spending money trying to
convince you otherwise.
On the other hand, if you want to create a WPF app using Python, or
embed a Ruby-based DSL for business rules inside your C# application, or
write a rich internet application using either of these languages, then
you’re the developer that we’re working hard to satisfy. And MRI and
CPython aren’t really alternatives in these scenarios.
The success of any programming language or environment depends largely
on the community that grows up around it.
On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 10:58 AM, Curt H. [email protected]
wrote:
Ruby-based DSL for business rules inside your C# application, or write a
rich internet application using either of these languages, then you’re the
developer that we’re working hard to satisfy. And MRI and CPython aren’t
really alternatives in these scenarios.
Don’t forget the folks who for one reason or another are tied to Windows
as
a platform. My hope is that IronRuby is Ruby enough to replace MRI, so I
don’t have to mentally switch back and forth from implementation to
implementation when I have a need for .NET interop.
Also, I think there are alot of developers who desperately want to be
able
to easily deploy Django or Rails apps on IIS7. Easily meaning minimal
fuss
and not having to involve the sysadmin folks. I know this is not a
stated
goal, but if you could demonstrate easy deployment and show a
significant
performance improvement you/Microsoft may actually gain new users.
The success of any programming language or environment depends largely
on
the community that grows up around it.
Agreed. I think some on this thread have been too harsh on Microsoft
about
marketing or promoting IronRuby. I think that it is too early to start
that
process. I’m surprised how uneasy some are feeling about Microsoft’s
plans
or lack of plans for their DLR-based languages.
IronRuby is released as an Open Source project today, because we are
interested in attracting contributors to help us finish the
implementation. We have gotten some awesome contributions from folks in
the community, and I thank you all for your continued help and support.
IronRuby is not ready for folks to use; this is why we haven’t
released binaries yet. We have a lot of work to do to improve our
working set, our startup time, and our throughput. When we have
acceptable quality around those numbers, we will begin releasing
binaries and marking them as “Alphas”, “Betas”, “RCs” etc. At that time
I’ll talk more about plans for the future.
There are folks on this list who are interested in becoming users of the
language, as opposed to contributors. To you early adopters, I applaud
your courage 
You can help us out by answering questions on the
forums, filing bug reports, writing FAQs, maintaining the wiki,
twittering, blogging etc. But let’s turn our attention back to the work
at hand - finishing IronRuby. You can all help out in your own way.
Before posting, however, ask yourself - is what you’re posting helping
to move IronRuby forward in a constructive way?
Thanks,
-John
John,
Just throwing this out there to get your take…
Do you think it’s time to add an IronRuby-users or an IronRuby-talk ?
Yes it’s not ready for prime time yet, but there are obviously alot of
people interested in just using it, perhaps an offical outlet for their
thoughts without cluttering up the core mailing list could be
insightful…
On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 1:45 PM, John L. (IRONRUBY)
[email protected]
Nice post John. I could not agree more. This is true of IronRuby and
any
open source project, we should be doing things to move forward not
laterally
by complaining what is not there or what is not being done for you.
This is a great project and we all have the ability to contribute.
Microsoft has not opened up to outside contribution until recently and
this
should be applauded and supported.
-Rob B.
On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 1:45 PM, John L. (IRONRUBY)
[email protected]
Agreed. I think some on this thread have been too harsh on Microsoft about
marketing or promoting IronRuby. I think that it is too early to start that
process. I’m surprised how uneasy some are feeling about Microsoft’s plans
or lack of plans for their DLR-based languages.
I completely agree that it’s way too early to be marketing IR. However,
my
comment above came from what I heard from people “in the know” in the
Ruby
community, who said that Microsoft won’t be putting any marketing
dollars
into IR once it’s released. The impetus needs to come from us, the
community. Sure, there may be some documentation and samples of how to
use
it with other MS products, but that’s different than marketing.
-Joe