litany against fear

IronRuby drops - make some noise!

A little context about myself and recent events:

1. I used to be big into .NET before Ruby.
2. I decided to move away from .NET over 2 years ago.
3. For the past 4 months I’ve been using ASP.NET MVC 2 for my senior capstone project.
4. IronRuby’s 1.0 release has dropped!

This week Scott Bellware wrote about why this should matter to anyone doing .NET, especially the ‘forward thinking’ ALT.NET crowd. I’m not too familiar with the history of the ALT.NET movement, but I love following smart developers in any sector of our industry on Twitter and I’ve been watching more .NET devs lately because of my senior project.

Here’s Scott’s main points as I saw it:

• Comparsions of Rails to ASP.NET MVC 2 are difficult (I agree!)
• Getting the average .NET developer out of the Visual Studio comfort zone is still unlikely
• You can now painlessly use Ruby and Rails with IIS and .NET in general
• Stop using .NET ports of Ruby projects, you can just run them with IronRuby now!

After reading it and seeing Jason Meridth’s tweet…

…I had to give a Rubyist response. My reaction is: Welcome! I don’t think fear has anything to do with it, it’s just hard to break out of the norm for any of us. I’m positive you’ll have fun learning Ruby and integrating with your existing .NET infrastructure.

I’m right behind Scott in that the barrier to entry for those on Windows and in the .NET ecosystem has been lowered immensely. Plenty have said it before, but now is the time to start. Many of us have converted over from C#/VB.NET, and I can’t be the only one who’s happy to share their experience with those considering diving into Ruby.

Let me start you off right now:

• Rails Guides, a daily reference and great starter manual
• Railscasts, tons of great recipes in video form
• Rails Tutorial, a book in progress
• Intro to Sinatra, the classiest web framework around

IronRuby has dropped, but you have to make the noise. We Rubyists are waiting to hear from you!