Microsoft announces IronRuby

Now that’s something. Microsoft announced IronRuby at their MIX07 conference. IronPython developer Jim Hugunin provides some details about extensions to the .NET CLR made to improve support for scripting languages. The extension is called Dynamic Language Routine.

Namespace Your Rails Model

I had a nice revelation earlier this week, when I finally tested some code I wrote in the wild, the wild being BackgrounDRb. The code used some pretty common class and module names. I didn’t expect many problems when I used something along the lines of Sync or Synchronizer. When running the code in test cases there wasn’t any problem.

CSSEdit Keeps Getting Better And Better

MacRabbit today released CSSEdit v2.5, a release sporting some nice new features, amongst them tabs (gotta have those), a shiny inspector for X-ray to get all the details on the styles a particular element has, and last but not least, a selector builder to make the sometimes-hassle of building the right selector a visual pleasure.

CSSEdit is one of my favorite tools on the Mac. It’s a perfect example how design and function can be integrated into a focussed and usable application.

Go grab it while it’s hot.

In other news, the good folks at Panic today released Coda, an integrated web development environment. Mind you, it’s not Dreamweaver, no, it looks better. Though I prefer my stack of tools it definitely looks like a thought-through and well-designed tool. I’ll definitely take it for a spin.

A Fix for Rails 1.2

While setting up a new project with Rails 1.2.3 I ran across a weird issue in my tests. Somewhere from the CGI class (belonging to Ruby’s core lib and extended by Rails) a nil object was used and threw an error. Turns out this was introduced in 1.2.2 with a fix that was supposed to improve CGI handling on Windows.