Ruby in the Studio
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Software, Developer, Windows, Microsoft on
A while back Microsoft announced that it was changing the licensing requirements for Visual Studio. Yes, it probably was a response to the success of Eclipse, but it also changed the way Microsoft worked with development tools partners. Two significant announcements today show that it’s a strategy that is starting to pay off.
So what did Microsoft do? First, anyone could get access to the Visual Studio IDE. That meant you could use its editor, and its code completion tools with any language. You could host anything yyou liked in the Visual StudioShell, using it for modelling tools, for programming, or for just about anything you wanted. A generic multi-pane shell could host just about any application, from a E-911 call centre hub, to a (dare we say it in these times of crisis) bank trading desk.
The second part of the change was one of the most significant. Now you didn’t need to target Windows with your development tools. That meant you could use Visual Studio to host a PHP editor working against UNIX Apache web servers, or a development tool for Android or BlackBerry.
One of the tools announced today works in just that way. SapphireSteel’s Ruby In Steel is a Ruby On Rails development tool, built entirely inside the Visual Studio Shell. You can running the resulting code on any Ruby interpreter - whether it’s a Windows version (like Microsoft’s own IronRuby) or one running on a Linux web server somewhere on Amazon’s hosted RedHat EC2 servers.
While Ruby In Steel is a commercial tool, there’s a personal edition for anyone who wants to start learning Ruby - and it’s a free download. It’ll integrate with Visual Studio if you’ve already got the latest version in place, or it’ll install its own Visual Studio Shell-based UI.
The other Visual Studio announcement came from Embarcadero, home of CodeGear (the old Borland tools company). While most of us had thought they were leaving .NET development behind with the new release of Delphi, for very good reasons to do with developing for the legacy Windows install base, it turned out that they’d been developing a version of Delphi that would drop into Visual Studio, and work with .NET and the rest of the .NET languages. That’s a big move for Embarcadero, and one that will have a significant impact on developers producing rapid UI-driven applications inside businesses. It remains to be seen if Embarcadero’s database tools follow Delphi, but if they do, it’ll be a very interesting add on to a familair environment.
The Microsoft developer world is getting interesting again, and with the snippets of Visual Studio 10 that got announced a week ago, it’s going to get even more interesting over the next couple of years.
We’ll be going into things in more detail from Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in LA in a few weeks time. Stay tuned!
–Simon
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