Ruby in Steel Goodness
Posted by Marcus Wyatt on 20 June 2007
I’ve had a play with Ruby in Steel for Visual Studio 2005 when Sapphire Steel released the first Developer edition about a year ago. The first version on my system was clunky and painfully slow. The Ruby intellisense was slow and overall the experience was not great.
Well, why would you tell this to me know?
Because, earlier this week my eye caught a post about Visual Ruby in my aggregator. So I browsed over to the post and then got reminded about Ruby in Steel. So I decided to give it another try. Wow, what an improvement.
The debugging features are just brilliant. So seamless, you would think you’re working within a language like C#.
The intellisense is crisp and rdoc information is displayed where available:
The following Intellisense features for Ruby source files are implemented:
- Member Completion Lists
- Keyword Completion Lists
- Variable Completion Lists
- Quick Info Tooltips
- Parameter Info Tooltips
You also have the Snippets features of visual studio for template functionality.
Another cool feature is the Ruby Explorer which is a class browsing tool which can be used to view an alphabetical outline of Ruby classes and methods.
All in all I’m really impressed by the progress the tool made since the version 1.0 release a couple of months ago. I’m seriously considering maybe to invest in a license for the tool. But I think they should seriously consider the freelance developer out there. When ReSharper announced their personal license I was really excited about the move and yes, I did buy a personal license. Hopefully the Sapphire Steel guys would consider something similar…
If you are a .NET developer for food and a budding RoR developer for fun and don’t have that flash MacBook Pro yet. Then maybe Ruby in Steel is just what you’d need.
