The richness of the .NET platform has just got that much richer,
We are pleased to announce the release of a new Beta (version 0.7) of the Gardens Point Ruby.NET compiler. Since the last release we have added support for debugging (by generating pdb files) and have created a Visual Studio integration package allowing users to edit, build, execute and debug Ruby programs within Visual Studio 2005. This includes syntax colouring, error highlighting, brace matching, hidden regions, Ruby.NET projects, project properties, project templates and project item templates. Ruby.NET projects (.rbproj) enable multiple Ruby source files to be compiled into a single .NET assembly.
As we have not yet registered our Visual Studio integration package with Microsoft, to use it you will need to preinstall the Visual Studio 2005 SDK version 4.0. For those without Visual Studio or the SDK, you can still use Ruby.NET from the command line as previously. We now have two front-ends to our compiler. One called RubyCompiler.exe takes similar command line arguments to the C# compiler and can be used to compile multiple Ruby source files into a single assembly. Our other front-end, called Ruby.exe takes approximately the same command line arguments as the C Ruby interpreter and transparently compiles, loads and executes a Ruby source file without writing any assemblies to disk.
In addition to Visual Studio integration, we have continued extending and fixing bugs in the compiler and our implementation of Ruby’s builtin classes and modules. Still no performance optimizations or support for interop with other .NET languages. We will have support for interop in our next release.
Nice! A list of acknowledgments found at the bottom of the same page linked to above follows. To each of you involved with bringing this project and release into fruition: Thanks!
* Dr. Wayne Kelly
* Prof. John Gough
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank:
* Microsoft for their technical and financial support of this project.
* Yukihiro Matsumoto, et.al for creating the Ruby language and making their source available.
* The IronPython team for their technical support and allowing us to use their BigInteger library.
* Charles O Nutter from the JRuby team for his helpful discussions.
* All of you who have wished us well!
* And the rest of our development team:
o Douglas Stockwell
o Brian Blackwell
o Chien Jon Soon
o Wayne Reid
o Gordon Mountford
o Johannes Sasongko
o Gary Chan
