James Crisp

nRake, the premier project and build template for .NET projects using the Rake build system now has a branch for .NET4 using IronRuby. Projects are also updated to VS2010 format, and Albacore gems are now updated to 0.1.5.

Check out the IronRuby .NET 4 branch of nRake.

or the check out the IronRuby .NET 2 / 3.5 branch of nRake.

Master branch is still using MRI ruby 1.9. However, plans are to change over to IronRuby for master branch in the future. IronRuby is now performing well enough and sufficiently compatible to support .NET builds. IronRuby has advantages around size (smaller download) and more exciting interop possibilities with .NET code.

At the ALM Conference, Richard interviewed me for a podcast on the Ultimate ALM Environment circa 2010 as well as a little on build and deployment automation. Check out the podcast on Talking Shop!

Here are the slides and code from yesterday's talk at Sydney ALT.NET.

See Steve Sanderson's post for the code/binary for subclassed aspx compiler and more information about the automatic encoding approach we covered in the talk.

I'll be giving a lightning talk on securing your ASP.NET MVC site against code injection and x-site scripting next Tuesday 25 August at the Sydney ALT.NET group. I'll be demonstrating potential pitfalls and dangers of arbitary code injection, and how you can protect against it, elegantly. We've got 6 interesting talks lined up for the night. See you there!

This evening we had the first Sydney Alt.Net meeting. It went really well. Our venue at the ThoughtWorks offices was pretty packed with about 35 interested people coming along. We started with a discussion of news in the .NET space, and then broke for food. After that we had my presentation on Ruby & Rails from a .NET perspective, followed by Richard's presentation on Rhino Mocks. We ended with a retrospective to gather feedback and thoughts for future meetings. Thanks to everyone for coming along and making it such a great night! And also a big thank you to ThoughtWorks for the venue, food and drink.

Here's the slides from "Ruby and Rails from a .NET perspective". It's a bit hard to give you a transcript of the demos but here is a taste of some of the ruby commands we looked at today.

Basic IronRuby Console demo

4+4
"hello".class
$friends = ["James", "Richard", "Bill"]
$friends.find_all { |f| f.include? "a" }
$friends.collect { |f| f.length }
"-" * 100
$person_type = Struct.new(:name, :age, :sex)
$j = person_type.new("James", 27, "m")

Iron Ruby Calling WinForms

require 'System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'
Form = System::Windows::Forms::Form
MessageBox = System::Windows::Forms::MessageBox
Button = System::Windows::Forms::Button 

$b = Button.new
$b.text = "Hello Button"
$f = Form.new
$f.controls << $b
$f.show_dialog

Simple Rails App Demo

rails myapp
ruby script/generate scaffold Person name:string age:integer
rake db:migrate
ruby script/server

Exciting news! We now have an ALT.NET group in Sydney! Our first meeting is Tuesday 30 September. Meetings will be the last Tuesday of the month.

Rough agenda for the first meeting is:

6:00pm   Meet & Greet time and then Kick Off!
6:30pm   "Ruby, Rails and IronRuby from a .NET perspective" (me).
7:00pm   Break with food and drink
7:30pm   "Mocking with Rhino Mocks 3.5" (Richard Banks).
8:00pm   Wrap up & go home.

ThoughtWorks is sponsoring the event with a nice office location in the CBD, and also pizza and beer. So if you're planning to come, please comment or send me or Richard Banks a mail to help us get enough food and drinks for everyone.

Address is:
Level 8, 51 Pitt Street
Sydney NSW 2000 Australia
[Map]

ALT.NET is about designing and building the best solutions possible. This means continuous improvement, retrospection and often reaching outside the mainstream, considering Open Source frameworks and tools, Agile methodologies and ideas from other language communities such as Ruby, Java and Haskell.

For more info about ALT.NET, check out our Sydney ALT.NET Blog, and the main ALT.NET wiki.

See you on the 30th!