14 DAY TRIAL // Just as Novell is building an open source implementation of Silverlight dubbed Moonlight, so Microsoft is hard at work producing an open source implementation of the Ruby programming language for .NET and Silverlight. Charlie Calvert, C# Community program manager revealed that this week the team behind the project announced the availability of the second Release Candidate of IronRuby. As of February 10, 2010, developers can download and start testing IronRuby 1.0 RC2. Since IronRuby is an open source project, Microsoft is welcoming both contributors and testers, and inviting them to help with the finalization of version 1.0.
“As IronRuby approaches the final 1.0, these RCs will contain crucial bug fixes and enhancements that IronRuby requires to be a fast and compatible 1.0. Now that IronRuby is in the release-candidate stage, your feedback is even more important. Please use these new binaries as much as you can and report any issues you find,” Calvert stated. “The actual version of the assemblies is "0.9.4.0"; they will be updated to "1.0.0.0" when the last anticipated RC of IronRuby 1.0 is released.”
Although IronRuby has its own website, it’s also hosted on Microsoft’s repository of open source project, CodePlex. It is on CodePlex that developers need to go in order to grab the downloads, release notes, changelogs and the source code. IronRuby is made available under Microsoft Public License, which is a Microsoft open source license.
“We are building a high-quality implementation of Ruby, with excellent performances and seamless integration with .NET libraries and infrastructure. We are targeting compatibility with the 1.8.x branch of Ruby modulo continuations,” reads an excerpt of the project's official description. “IronRuby heavily leverages Microsoft's Dynamic Language Runtime, and both are released with full source code under the Microsoft Public License. The IronRuby source code is hosted on GitHub, which is a great source control service. We're looking for contributions to the IronRuby libraries; our goal is to achieve parity with the Ruby standard libraries. If you love .NET and Ruby, then we need your help!”