I met Ola Bini at the local Geeknight the other day and we had a brief chat about platforms, Ruby and RDF among other things. Ola mentioned that he wasn’t sure that Rails wuld run on IronRuby - Microsoft’s implementation of Ruby for the CLR.

I have been following what John Lam has been writing about their progress (and I correctly predicted him joining Microsoft:-) and it appears that running Rails is a goal of the IronRuby project. But, will that be of interest to Microsoft? MS recently launched the first version of an MVC framework for the ASP.NET platform. This seems like an attempt to satisfy the curiosity of .net developers that have seen screen casts and office mates develop apps in Ruby on Rails. The framework is part of the Visual Studio 2008 offerings.

If you were able to deploy a Rails app by dropping a DLL on a Windows web server I can see Rails popularity exploding. The .net platform seems to occupy a mid-level segment of application hosting operations, right where Rails development seem to be.

Only time will tell I guess.