* “IronRuby – Ruby running on .NET (Microsoft Project)”

Ironruby is a Microsoft initiative to run Ruby on .NET

currently it is in Pre-alpha1 , so only source code is available. You have to compile it to use it

I have compiled and uploaded it at IronRuby-PreAlpha1-BinDistribution-Ashish.zip

which is a just 422KB zip file

Download it and unzip it. Read the README provided into it and start to play. ( You require atleast .NET Framework 2.0 to run it, so download that from Microsoft website.)

HOWTO run:
install .NET framework 2.0 or greater
unzip THIS ironruby binary distributable
run rbx.exe

EXECUTE ruby lines: on the rbx, execute the following
>>puts “Hi Ashish”
will unsurprisingly print – Hi Ashish

EXECUTE .NET thingy from ironruby:
>>require ‘mscorlib’
>>require ‘System.Windows.Forms’
>>System::Windows::Forms::MessageBox.show ‘Hi Ashish’

will show a GUI window (messagebox) with ‘Hi Ashish’ written in it

to quit
>>exit

i am just dying to see it opened up to expand IronRuby

but my only concern is its license which is MSPL (Microsoft Permissive License) , which does not allow any entry to be in any license other than MSPL. though i am no lawyer, my only point of concern is that the ruby.NET initiative by QUT university is using BSD license. Now if one group of developer have developed a significant amount of ruby libraries in BSD, then that will not be distributable in the official distribution of IronRuby. It will lead to unnecessary duplication of effort in the sense of ruby libraries porting to .NET. Whatta say?

Microsoft has committed itself to move it to rubyforge in near future, which is a move to create confidence in ruby community.

anyways, for now rubyists can play with native .NET (without bridges) on ironruby.