Net

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. ...

As someone hinted in the comments to my previous posts on ASP.NET MVC frameworks, Microsoft is apparently releasing a new MVC framework to make ASP.NET development simpler. According to the latest news, it will be released sometime after Visual Studio 2008. Last time I heard VS2008 is scheduled for a late february 2008 release which means we should be lucky to see this framework sometime in March.

I have been looking into development frameworks for a web based software product. I want the product to be able to be installed on a variety of platforms, including Windows server with IIS. First I was looking at creating the app in ASP.NET and make it run under Mono. Unfortunately I can’t find an MVC framework for ASP.NET that works the way I want. Ruby on Rails has really lowered the threshold of what I can put up with in the form of configuration and learning curve. Damn you DHH and your rapid web framework:-) ...

I have been looking for an open source alternative to the default way of buildig web sites in ASP.NET with Visual Studio. After having build a couple of applications with Ruby on Rails it hard to go back to the Page Controller pattern that Microsoft introduced in ASP.NET. Coming back to the ASP.NET page event model makes it clear that they created it for VB6 application developers that were used to Windows forms-centered development. Apparently they didn’t want to those developers to have to learn about HTTP and HTML to be able to write applications. ...

Things are heating up in the Ruby-as-a-dotnet-language area. Martin Fowler voiced his concerns on Microsoft not being able to look at source code and therefore having trouble implementing Ruby properly. Microsoft, with John Lam in the cockpit, is implementting Ruby for the .net platform (if you have been reading my previous blog posts I predicted way back in february 2006 that John Lam would get scooped up my Microsoft:-). Ola Bini is also concerned about Microsoft not letting ther developers look at the Ruby implementation. If you remember the whole SCO debacle I guess it isn’t that strange. Microsoft is in the position where software they develop potentially may end up in millions of computers. Apparently the US legal system awards damages in proportion to this. Thus, any issues with a Ruby implementation on .net can quickly become costly. ...

Let’s forget about that for a while. Ola Bini and the JRuby team is quickly moving forward with something I would consider a breakthrough in Rails deployment options. In fact, it could well mean a breakthrough in Rails adoption in many organizations. Why (some) IT-managers like Rails but don’t like deploying it When I was a consultant I talked to many IT-managers that had heard about Ruby on Rails. They were intrigued by the fact that Ruby and Rails were created for developers rather than machines. Most of them realized that developer time costs more than computer performance today (although some of them were still spending money at developers writing unnecessarily complicated code to run fast on hardware that costs less than 20 developer hours). ...

At the opening keynote here at RailsConf in Chicago Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic Programmer fame) presented three problems for the Rails community to solve. His idea was that these would help Rails become more popular in organizations. I would like to add two more: a SOAP library and an improved MSSQL-server driver. Judging from the amount of Microsoft-bashing going on here I would venture to guess that these aren’t on the top of the list for most Rails developers. However, I believe they would make it a lot easier to implement Rails applications in the corporate world and increase the Rails adoption rate. ...

John Lam has created an initial version of RubyCLR which allows you to use Ruby through the .NET CLR. Although there is no support for generics or marshaling of user-defined value types it is still a very interesting release. Microsoft will undoubtedly monitor his progress closely. Maybe he will go the same way as Jim Hugunin who created IronPython and then joined Microsoft’s CLR team.

Selenium (by Thoughtworks) is on open source tool for automated functional tests. It’s simplicity makes it an excellent candidate for introducing automated functional testing in your project. (Hi! This article is now several years old and updates may have changed how Selenium works) Setting it up for an ASP.NET application is done in a few simple steps: Download Selenium (choose the full install). Create a folder “selenium” in your web site root folder. Unpack the zip file and move the selenium files to to the selenium folder. That’s it! Selenium is now installed. You can test the installation by running the Selenium self-test by pointing your browser to http://localhost/selenium/TestRunner.html. Selenium runs in your browser of choice and there is nothing more to install. ...