Dr Nic

Recently Wayne Kelly spoke at the Brisbane Ruby and Rails Brigade about Ruby.NET (code repository).

We figured he was some authority figure on the topic, as he wrote it, together with some other members of his QUT department, plus a growing number of Ruby.NET users and contributors.

Local Microsoft officialdom sponsored the show with pizza and then drinks afterwards. Ok, I’m understating that - Charles Sterling is an ex-.NET project manager, who is now in Oz for a Tour of Duty as an Evangelist. In his capacity as an evangelist, he giveth us thy pizza. Twas tasty too.

I believe Ruby.NET is in direct competition with IronRuby for the hearts and minds of Ruby/.NET/Windows developers.

Wayne starts the video below with a comparison of the two, plus a few other Ruby implementations (sorry Evan, Rubinius wasn’t mentioned).

Fortunately we were treated to a demo early in the show. Wayne had recently implemented Ruby code-behind for some of the drag-and-drop widgets that come with Visual Studio. It was very sexy to see all that Ruby being generated.

The video also includes lots of “why Ruby is hard to work with as a compiler writer”, and more importantly, there are lots of audience questions all throughout the talk. This might be why the talk is 1.45hrs long!!

Enjoy… (and the slides from Wayne)