IronRuby and ASP.Net MVC

It looks like John Lam and company are making some really good progress with commit 111 on IronRuby.

Along side IronRuby, the ASP.Net MVC team is developing the MVC framework rapidly with multiple releases in the last 6 months.

As these two ventures mature, I believe some really great projects will emerge. One project that has unified the Ruby/Rails community is RubyGems.  I strongly believe that we need a similar package manager. There has been some talk of this kind of project, but I haven’t seen anything significant yet.

The best of what comes out of these projects will not necessarily be the ability to run Ruby on Rails or imitate it, although running it will be a great milestone. The real action will be from idiomatic home-grown projects.

Rubyists, Pythonistas, Perl Mongers, Java and Smalltalk

If you are geeky and keep up on different programming languages you will likely get a kick out of this video which was shot at Ruby Conf.  Warning, if you aren’t paying attention to current programming language developments this video will likely pass right over your head.

PowerShell left hand rule

PowerShell uses the “left hand” rule when deciding how to interpret operators. Meaning that the type of the value on the left side of the operator is dominant. Here are some examples:

2+2  (gives 4)

2+”2″  (gives 4)

“2” + 2  (gives “22”, string data type wins out using + for concatenation)

“2” + 5  (gives “25”, concatenation again)

To have a little more fun try some multiplication:

3 * 3 (gives 9, ok this is still boring)

4 * “5”  (gives 20, the “5” becomes an integer)

“3” * 4 (gives “3333”, that’s more interesting, “3” means the string data type is the primary type, this acts much like Ruby)

Here is a bit more that might be interesting:

15,30,45 + 3  (gives a new list of 15,30,45,5)

15,30,45 * 3  (gives a new list of 15,30,45,15,30,45,15,30,45)

Kind of cool how this works.  The DOS prompt was stone-age comparatively.

Iowa Code Camp – Spring 2008

We are planning our first ever Iowa Code Camp.  It’s going to happen at the University of Iowa’s Conference Center in Iowa City on Saturday May 3rd.

The details are coming together nicely and we already have about 1/2 of our speakers in place.

Our current sponsors are:

• University of Iowa
• Microsoft
• And several others are in the works

We are currently looking for more sponsors to provide some good food, drinks and prizes.

If you are interested in helping in any way, leave me a comment and I’ll make sure to pass your information on to the right person.

Javier has already posted the Code Camp on bostondotnet.org

IronRuby released on RubyForge

Wow, John Lam has released IronRuby on RubyForge as promised. Microsoft made a good move by embracing Ruby and hiring John. I’m looking forward to playing with the bits and getting to use them in Silverlight.