IronRuby

Happy New Year! It’s been a hectic holiday season here in the Pacific Northwest. We were snowed in over here for somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 days or so. I wanted to spend most of my time with family, but I’m sneaking away for a few ... [More] hours today to prepare for the new year. I’m writing this post from my office in my new chair that I picked up from Plush over at the Redmond Town Center: No that’s not me :) It’s a fantastic chair. I wanted an alternative place to work that wasn’t just my desk (which is a great setup, but a bit of variety is a good thing). I got the fur cover which makes it feel like I’m sitting on a giant teddy bear. I’m writing this post on my Lenovo X200s, which finally arrived after deciding to take a tour of Canada for a week: This is a fantastic laptop. The keyboard is hands-down the best keyboard that I’ve used. It’s significantly better than the T61p that I have, and I’m finding that I prefer the feel of its keyboard over my 17” MBP as well. I’m loving the fact that I now have the extra keys that I’ve been missing on the Mac. Form Follows Function. My top criteria around laptops are: 1) Screen quality – this thing has a 1440 x 900 LED backlit display which is fantastic. A good compromise considering the laptop weighs in at around 3.2 lbs with the 9-cell battery that I have installed. 2) Battery life – this thing has crazy battery life. I have the screen set at max brightness right now, and my battery meter shows 7 hours remaining at 88% charge. 3) Emissions – heat and sound. This thing is quiet and is not hot at all. This was the thing that annoyed me the most with the MBP – it was hot *and* loud. Playing a movie on it without headphones on was an exercise in frustration. 4) Performance. This thing is plenty fast with the 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo. It rates 4.9 on the Vista CPU perf, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. It has 6MB L2 Cache, but I also paired the laptop up with the most excellent Intel X25-M SSD. The Intel SSD was the thing that turned this into a very special laptop. There are no annoying pauses at all while working. My system is instantly responsive after logging on – which certainly isn’t the case with my quad core desktop because of all of that contention for the HDD head. It boots really quickly, shuts down fast. Now that I’m all geared up for the new year, I’m looking forward to the goals that I’ve set for myself: 1) Ship IronRuby. 2) I want to make it just as easy for an external developer to work on IronRuby as someone who sits down the hall from me. 3) Work on the fit and finish that will make IronRuby a great experience for .NET developers. Integration with ASP.NET MVC, fixing our interop bugs, fixing our startup and working set issues, and getting some quality docs out there. 4) Refactoring me. I’m going to fix a bunch of things that I’m not happy with. I’m turning into a fatso again and that’s not cool. Part of this is admitting that I have a problem, and then figuring out that I don’t have to do it alone. I’m not going to do crazy things like my brother is doing (40” vertical in 2009!) but I should be able to hit 150 lbs this year. I hope you all have a great year! Permalink | Leave a comment  » [Less]

As usual, PDC 2008 was a great event. I had a chance to meet a lot of old friends (it’s been 7 years since I’ve been to a PDC- it attracts a certain crowd that only shows up there) and I’m happy to see that everyone’s doing well. My ... [More] IronRuby talk was the first day of the conference. It was a crazy mixture of many, many demos (9 in all) which showed: - when and why you should create a new type in IronRuby using C# - how to write a Visual Studio plug-in using Ruby - how to build a unit test and mock object framework - how to integrate Ruby scripting into your existing C# application - how to build simple web services using Sinatra Only one blew up (the last one) when I forgot to change the type name in my ironruby_mischief.rb file to the type that I created in the IronRuby libraries. You can watch it on TV now (Silverlight required). Brief Rant: Session evaluations are a great way to give direct feedback to the teams. Sure, you can send email to the speakers directly, but session evaluations get circulated fairly broadly internally and are often used by management for future product plans. They are a great way for you to influence the way we plan and prioritize the work that we need to do. But there’s really not a lot in it for you, the attendee, outside of maybe some personal satisfaction that you helped to influence the products that you use (that’s if you knew how influential they can be in the first place). Here’s my proposal:give direct incentives for folks to fill out their evaluations. It can be something as simple as 1 eval == 1 ticket for a drawing for prizes at the end of the conference. The more evals you submit, the greater your chances for winning prizes that are donated by the sponsors. You could do things like what Stack Overflow does: give merit badges to folks that provide quality feedback. Written comments are always preferable to just clicking on radio buttons, so you could earn more merit points by doing just that. The whole system is online anyway, and it wouldn’t be that hard to implement. You could even do something simple like write 5 evaluations to get your conference T-shirt. That should significantly improve the response rate, considering what the awesome power of T-shirts are in the geek world :) I don’t believe that this would skew the feedback in a significant way. Hopefully we’ll hear more from the ‘silent majority’ this way. For example, I had 245 people in my IronRuby talk and as of this writing, I only have 15(!) evaluations. If you read this far (and you attended my talk at PDC) please click here to submit your evaluation. Apparently that link is some kind of one-time link. You'll (unfortunately) have to go to the PDC site and navigate to my session (TL44). What I liked: I loved the Big Room. It was a place where folks could gather to meet and mingle. Since I want to talk to customers at the show, I was happy to spend virtually all of my time in the Big Room talking to customers. But there was one talk that I did attend: Miguel de Icaza’s awesome Mono and .NET talk. Horrible title – it really should be called “Awesome Mono hacks by Miguel and his band of merry hackers”. Here’s the coolest thing that he showed: Mono applications running on a non-jailbroken iPhone. Yes, you heard that right. For those of you who aren’t in the know about these things, the iPhone SDK prevents you from writing a JIT compiler through some kernel restrictions (you can’t mark a writable page as executable). It also prohibits you from writing an interpreter so that they can maintain their lock on application distribution via the App Store. So how did they do it? They made it possible to compile an entire Mono application into a single binary executable which gets signed via xCode and downloaded to the phone. This opens up some pretty awesome opportunities for using .NET as a platform for building apps that run on the iPhone. He also showed a very cool C# REPL in action. There are some cool UI ideas from his REPL that are going to find a nice home in the IronRuby REPL :) Lots of fun banter during the talk as well. Click here to watch it on TV (video not there right now at the time of this writing, but should be there soon). I had a chance to meet a lot of folks, and once my talk was done, I decided to try and shoot photos of as many of my friends as I could. I’ll continue to upload them to my PDC 2008 flickr photoset as I process them on my laptop. More later as I continue to collect my thoughts. Permalink | Leave a comment  » [Less]

I had the honor of meeting with a delegation from Fukuoka, Japan this morning at Microsoft's Executive Briefing Center. Part of the delegation represents the Ruby Business Commons, one of the largest Ruby SIGs in Japan (> 500 people as of ... [More] August 2008). They were here to talk to us about Ruby, its impact in Fukuoka, and how we can work together to help promote Ruby and IronRuby in the IT industry in Fukuoka. It was a challenging meeting since everything had to be done through a translator (who did a remarkable job). They had some great questions and suggestions for how we can work together to help promote Ruby in the Enterprise in Japan. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do together to help spread the love. Permalink | Leave a comment  » [Less]