Ruby in Steel was officially released yesterday. This IDE plugin for VS2005 allows developers to build Ruby applications using VS2005.
To get started I downloaded the latest copy of Ruby for Windows and the Ruby in Steel plugin. You need to install Ruby if you do not already have it installed.
Once you have it installed you have a new option to when you create projects.
The project types are Ruby Project, Rails Project, and Import Project. In this case to test Steel I used a Ruby Project named HelloRuby. You can also use the solution feature of VS2005 to group related projects.
At this point I had a solution with a project called HelloWorld. I then added a new item. The available new items are Ruby File, Ruby Module, Ruby Class, EmptyRuby/ HTML File and Ruby/ HTML File.
The next step was to add in some code for HelloWorld. In this case I used a loop and printed hello 10 times.
for ss in 1...10
print ss, " Hello\n";
end;
To run the program you use a new menu called Ruby. There are several Ruby specific items in this menu. The free verision does not support the Run and Debug options. So when I clicked Run Ruby I got a new tab with the output from Ruby running my program.
One thing that is beyond annoying is that a popup window is displayed proclaiming Ruby in Steel which I then have to click close. I could not find a way to stop this. As an occassional Ruby coder I guess I can put up with it. However if I used Ruby a lot I would have to decide to either get the pro version although without a trail version to see how much better it is I not sure I would plunck down $200 just to find out I hate the additional features.
But if my biggest complaint is a nag screen then they might just have a very good IDE for Ruby programmers.
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