Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

I decided to share my experiences on the path to IronRuby so far and perhaps it might be useful to others who wish to travel that road.

Not so long ago I posted about choices in front of me regarding learning a new language. After having programmed in C# for some 7 or so years I wasn’t going to choose another statically typed language, I wanted to add a dynamic language to my arsenal and with the DLR on it’s way and a key interest and stake in the Silverlight, the choice as obvious.

After having decided to dedicate the time and effort to IronRuby, the next question was how to address the learning. Clearly picking up IronRuby as the first pit stop was going to come with some difficulties borne out of the fact that the documentation isn’t great yet and the toolset way of being close. Based on this, I decided that learning Ruby first was the best way to progress this goal for two main reasons, one it allowed me to learn in the comfort of an IDE (NetBeans) to write ‘do as you learn‘ code and also gave me a perspective on IronRuby that is not indifferent to its genealogy.

So after downloading NetBeans (Ruby Edition) and installing Ruby 1.8.6, I got my hands on the excellent free online book by Jeremy McAnally, the title of which is “Mr Neighbourly’s Humble Little Ruby Book“. This book is a nice little quick starter to get you comfortable with the absolute basics of Ruby, but needs to be followed by something with a bit more industrial strength such as Matz very own offering The Ruby Programming Language.

Once having navigated this far, I decided that it was time to pull down the IronRuby bits and start to have a play. A while back now, Hanselman and Gu both posted some early pieces on getting started with IronRuby. Most people seem intent on making XAML based applications the focus of their IronRuby attention, which in turn lead me to DLR Pad (see the image above) which provides the ability to interactively script IronRuby (and IronPython) against a statically set window that contains a XAML UI layout (interesting). From there I found my way to Ivan Porto Carerro’s blog and book on IronRuby. Ivan’s book is not yet released but is available as early access, so I decided to avail myself of it.

And if your wondering what code looks like (see below) for something that you might have been routinely doing (as I was), it doesn’t take long to knock something (trivial in this case) together to begin to get the picture, in the case of having gone down the path I described above.

require ‘mscorlib’
require ‘System.Windows.Forms,
  Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
  PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089′

begin

    #alias the forms namespace
    Windows = System::Windows::Forms
    #new up a form & set it’s text
    first_ruby_window = Windows::Form.new
    first_ruby_window.Text = “Simons first Ruby Form”
    #new up a button
    first_ruby_button = Windows::Button.new
    #subscribe to the buttons click event
    first_ruby_button.click {|sender, args| first_ruby_button.Text =
                                    “I got clicked!”}
    #add the button to the form
    first_ruby_window.Controls.Add(first_ruby_button)
    #show my new form
    first_ruby_window.ShowDialog()

end

And we get the following:

So that’s my story (to date) and perhaps it offers some help in getting you underway with your IronRuby / DLR journey.