By now everyone and his twitter account has heard the news about Jimmy Schementi.  There's also the obvious back and forth about whether IronRuby can now be considered dead.  Most of it has been of the form of "the community will decide" versus "without Microsoft support, it's a dodo". Let me start my own take on this with my own experiences of IronRuby.  I've been concentrating on using it as a testing platform for C# code, with some success.  Here's my take on the current state of affairs: IronRuby 1.0 is a relatively good implementation...

I'm still finding my feet with RSpec, but early experiences are good.  I wish I could say the same for Cucumber.  Sadly, you can't really use RSpec's built-in mocking with the CLR, so we need an alternative.  Luckily Caricature takes the strain.  There's not a great deal to say that isn't covered by Ivan's introductory articles, it's that simple to use.  However, one thing I couldn't figure out was how to return a value that was dependent on the inputs.  I ended up contacting Ivan, who was extremely helpful and even updated the gem to help me out. Turns...

You might be wondering why on earth you'd want to do this, but it's trickier than it looks.  I've published a gist for it.  There's a couple of comments about how to get things set up as well. The bad news is, RSpec works, but Cucumber doesn't.  Instead I'm getting this: can't convert Array into java::util::List (TypeError) C:/Program Files/IronRuby 1.0v4/lib/ironruby/gems/1.8/gems/gherkin-2.0.2-universal-dotnet/lib/gherkin/native/ikvm.rb:37:in `new' C:/Program Files/IronRuby 1.0v4/lib/ironruby/gems/1.8/gems/cucumber-0.8.3/bin/../lib/cucumber/cli/configuration.rb:29:in `parse!' C:/Program Files/IronRuby 1.0v4/lib/ironruby/gems/1.8/gems/cucumber-0.8.3/bin/../lib/cucumber/cli/main.rb:94:in `configuration' C:/Program Files/IronRuby 1.0v4/lib/ironruby/gems/1.8/gems/cucumber-0.8.3/bin/../lib/cucumber/cli/main.rb:43:in `execute!' C:/Program Files/IronRuby 1.0v4/lib/ironruby/gems/1.8/gems/cucumber-0.8.3/bin/../lib/cucumber/cli/main.rb:25:in `execute' C:/Program Files/IronRuby 1.0v4/lib/ironruby/gems/1.8/gems/cucumber-0.8.3/bin/cucumber:8 C:\Program Files\IronRuby 1.0v4\bin\cucumber:19:in `load' C:\Program Files\IronRuby 1.0v4\bin\cucumber:19 Yes, you're reading the first line correctly.  The downside of...

Quick installation instructions: in the unlikely event that you don't have .NET 4.0 installed, get it from www.microsoft.com/net.  WARNING: Needs a reboot Download the .NET 4.0 zip file from http://ironruby.codeplex.com/releases/view/25901 Unzip it somewhere sensible.  Mine is in D:\Julian\Documents\Projects\IronRuby. Add the "bin" folder to your path.  Getting the Proxy Server Running Annoyingly, you need to change the code from the previous post, because I used a 1.9.1 idiom: the new lambda syntax and WEBrick doesn't seem to work under IronRuby's 1.9...

Okay, if you've got a working Ubuntu installation from the previous steps, this gets ruby working: sudo apt-get -y install ruby1.9.1 sudo apt-get install rubygems1.9.1 Note that the commands installed are "ruby1.9.1" and "gem1.9.1" instead of "ruby" and "gem".  You can now follow the Sinatra home page instructions and get Hello World running on your machine. At this point, I'm starting to get annoyed at how long everything takes to install on windows.  But the next bit was a bit more of a shock to me.  Ruby fans will know...