IronRuby

Update: Added missing profile.ps1 file. The IronRuby team is getting ready for another major push for the PDC. To get ready for this (be careful what you wish for!) I'm upgrading my laptop's hard drive from the stock 160GB that it came with ... [More] to a brand-spanking new Black Scorpio 320GB drive. This also means that I'm repaving my Boot Camp partition (I had previously allocated a measly 40GB on the old drive). While waiting for software to install, I figured that folks out there might be interested in what my setup is for a computer. So, here it is: Operating System and general productivity tools: I run Windows Vista SP1, 32-bit. I had tried to get Windows Server 2008 64 bit installed in the BootCamp partition, but it was a lost cause. The combination of my pre-Santa Rosa 17" MBP hardware and the general lack of 64 bit drivers made it virtually impossible to do a native OS install on the Boot Camp partition. I should be able to get 64 bit Windows Server 2008 installed in a Fusion virtual machine. I'll report later how that goes. I do have a mildly pimped out Vista Sidebar. I'm a huge fan of Christian's widgets. I use his CPU, Memory, and Network Traffic meters. I run WeatherBug, and Drive Activity as well. I don't find it nearly as useful on my laptop as I do on my desktop where I have two 21" panels. I use Internet Explorer quite a bit, especially for browsing internal Microsoft sites. I leave it set as my default browser, since I've always loved its startup time vs. Firefox. I'm currently using IE 7, but I do have IE 8 Beta 2 installed on one of my desktops at the office. I use Firefox 3 quite a bit as well, especially since it has Vimperator, which adds VI key-bindings to Firefox. IE should seriously consider building a Firefox compatible plug-in API so that it can run Firefox plug-ins. I'm a big fan of PicLens, and I have it installed on both IE and Firefox. As you might imagine, I spend a lot of time in Outlook 2007. While I have a hard time understanding why it needs to use 36 threads and open 3,319 OS handles to do its thing, it works quite well once I've pimped it out a bit with my three basic macros. I use Windows Live Writer to compose all of my blog posts. It works great with TypePad, who is my blogging hosting provider. Life is too short to run your own blog engine on some random hosting provider (I used to use Dreamhost back in the day). I want it to be somebody else's problem to solve if my site goes down. I use GridMove as a tiling window manager using its 2-part grid vertical template. CTRL-ALT-1 moves the active window to the left *half* of the screen, and CTRL-ALT-2 moves the active window to the right *half* of the screen. On my desktop, CTRL-ALT-3 moves the active window to the left half of monitor 2 and CTRL-ALT-4 moves the active window to the right half of monitor 2. It's easily the most useful utility that I've added in a long time. Developer Tools I use Visual Studio 2008 Team System, SP1. I configure it via a custom vssettings file that I've carried around from machine to machine. I use multiple enlistments so that I can do work in parallel. Some of the devs on my team have 6 enlistments(!) Such is life when you have to battle the Troll to get your changes committed into the source repository. I use ViEmu to enable VI key bindings in Visual Studio. Developer Division at Microsoft has a site license for it, but I'd definitely pay my own money for this. My primary text editor is vim. I have a custom .vimrc file that I've carried around from machine to machine. It's not as pimped out as some other folks' vim setup, but it works for me. I use Windows PowerShell for my day-to-day work. I have a mildly pimped out PowerShell console that uses a directory that I cloned from Scott Hanselman's machine. Like a lot of folks, I can't work without a good set of aliases. Those can be found in my profile.ps1. I have a Tools directory that I carry around from machine to machine. There's lots of stuff in it, but here's a general breakdown of the tools I use most often: Keith Brown's Password Minder Most of Mark Russinovich's Sysinternals Tools Notepad 2 - it's awesome for viewing integrated diff files. Lutz Roeder's Reflector Beyond Compare 2.0 AGREP RemapKey from the Windows Server Resource Kit (I remap Caps Lock to CTRL via this, reverse the Windows / ALT key mapping on the left side and re-assign my right Command key to DEL). IronRuby uses Subversion for our external-facing source control. Our SVN repo lives on RubyForge, and I use a combination of Tortoise SVN and the command-line tools to do my day-to-day work. IronRuby is using GIT for a few of our sub-projects. Eventually we'll be moving the primary source repository from SVN to GIT. Like most folks using GIT these days, we use the awesome github service. I use the MSysGit implementation on Windows with the option to run GIT from the Windows Command Prompt enabled. The Cloud More and more of my life is moving to the cloud. Here's a list of the services that I use, and the places where I go. I use flickr for posting my photos. I've been a Pro member for quite some time. For $25 / year it's a bargain. I don't really use flickr as a social network like some other folks, but I'm quite happy with how well it works for me. I use twitter to post random bits of status. The 140 character limit encourages posting. I'm pretty much only using the blog to post longer pieces. I use Google Reader to consume my RSS feeds. I use multiple computers every day, and I like the fact that read / unread status is stored in a central location. I use Google Apps for my domain for my personal email. I used to run my own Exchange Server back in the day, and the day I switched was an awesome liberating moment for me. I no longer run any servers in my house. I have a facebook account that I don't use all that much. It's pretty much at the bottom of my list of places to go. My status updates are via twitter, which makes it look like I'm on facebook a lot more than I actually am. What about you? As you might have figured out by now, I'm a big fan of minimalist UI, black backgrounds and keyboard-driven UI's. What's in your dev kit, and why do you love it? Permalink | Leave a comment  » [Less]

OSCON is a happy place for me. It’s my third OSCON, and I created good memories at each one. At my first OSCON, I was showing off RubyCLR to the world, and I met some folks from Microsoft who convinced me that it was the right time in my life to ... [More] go ship something big. At my second OSCON, I was working for The Man, and we announced that were accepting contributions into IronRuby – a big change at the time. Today, we’re raising the bar even higher in IronRuby. There are three changes happening today: 1. We’re shipping our first binary release. In this package, we’re taking a “batteries included” approach and shipping the Ruby standard libraries in it. This takes us a big step closer towards “IronRuby runs real Ruby programs”. 2. We’re announcing a new project: ironruby-contrib. It’s hosted at GitHub, an awesome place to do collaborative development. The goal of ironruby-contrib is to provide a place where folks from the community can participate in projects that enhance IronRuby or its underlying platforms. The first project in ironruby-contrib is the Rails plugin that we demonstrated at RailsConf this year. It makes it easier for Rails developers to add Silverlight to their Rails applications, and contains some of our ideas about migrating controller code to the client. Jimmy Schementi is the brains behind the project; see his introductory blog post for more details. 3. We’re announcing that we’ve submitted our first set of changes to the awesome RubySpec project. We’ve been talking about contributing to RubySpec for a long time now, but various things kept us from doing so. We’ve fixed those things now, which takes us a big step closer towards being an active participant in all things Open Source, and not just the things that we create. Permalink | Leave a comment  » [Less]