IronRuby at Tech Ed 2008

I’d like to start out by thanking everyone who came up to talk to me at the conference. We had a Dynamic Languages booth at the conference, and it was great to talk to all of the folks who took the time out to drop by for a visit.

A big thanks goes out to our booth staffers – Dave Fugate, Curt Hagenlocher, Jimmy Schementi, Bill Chiles and Mahesh Prakriya who helped to keep things running smoothly. Dave somehow managed to grab an enormous whiteboard from somewhere and used it to help answer many of the FAQs for folks who were hanging around waiting for a blue-shirted guy to become available.

Tech Ed is (not surprisingly) a very enterprisey conference. We spent at least as much time telling folks what Dynamic Languages were (or correcting their misperceptions) as we did talking about our team’s progress. We also had a whole bunch of folks come up to ask us questions about F# because, apparently, F# is now a dynamic language :)

By far the most frequently asked question was why dynamic languages? The advice that resonated the most with the folks that I talked to was about using it to help them build internal DSLs for their applications. This is the idea that you can use DSLs for part of your app, dynamic languages to help faciliate those DSLs, and statically typed languages for the foundational pieces. You'll find that this idea is often called polyglot programming.

The Talk

The IronRuby talk was the very last talk of the conference. Apparently I was one of the ‘big guns’ that would convince folks to stay all the way to the very end of the conference. While I prefer being at the start of the conference so that my talk can help drive further discussions with folks while they’re still there, it is what it is. Oh well, let’s see if the tubes can help start a conversation :).

My talk focused on three things. First up was an introduction to Ruby since half of the folks in the room hadn’t used Ruby before. I wrote a simple unit-testing framework live on stage. Each new feature in the framework helped to introduce a different feature of Ruby. At the very end of the talk I showed how that same framework could be used to test .NET code. Here it is in its entirety:

And here is some .NET code that we tested using this framework:

It worked rather well, and I think I’ll continue to use it at talks where I need to introduce Ruby to the audience.

Next, I talked about our Silverlight integration. I showed the excellent set of demos that Jimmy created for RailsConf last week, including his client-side Try IronRuby demo:

and the lovely Silverlight watch demo:

I also got a chance to sneak in some of the code I was hacking on in the evenings – an adapter that maps the HTML 5 Canvas API to Silverlight. I ran a few of the examples from the excellent Mozilla Canvas tutorials using a my adapter. I pasted some code (with minor rubification) from the Mozilla tutorial into the text box:

and hit run - the colored boxes with the translucent circles appeared below:

There's no reason why we couldn't do this with managed JavaScript either using the cross-language interop features of the DLR.

Oh yeah, there was one more thing that I demo'd - more on that tomorrow.

Comments

[David Mohundro]

John, great job on the presentation Friday - sorry it had to be the very last session! I stayed till the bitter end though and it was worth it :)

[Jeremy Wiebe]

I agree with David. Good presentation on Friday!

I'm wondering if that Silverlight Watch demo is available anywhere on the web? Jimmy demoed it to me at the Dynamic Lanugages booth and it blew my mind. :-)

[Ryan Riley]

Are you planning to release your HTML 5 Canvas adapter for Silverlight?