I think Time will be the most important ingredient in getting people amped on IR. It's probably too early to expect incredible enthusiasm from users groups. IronRuby, lacking VS integration and with all the command line stuff, doesn't demo in the usual Microsoft fashion, so it might be hard to wow the rank and file. If you do want to get people excited in a demo, I'd demo in the context of C# 4.0, so you can demo inside visual studio, and let people see IronRuby shine from within a familiar environment. Also, ASP.NET MVC with IronRuby might resonate better than RoR at first, and you could also try demo'ing with something like RubyMine, that does have intellisense and refactorings.
To get IronRuby to spread, I would focus on selling IronRuby proper to the vanguard (Alt).NET communities, their bloggers, thought leaders, etc. who have large followings among progressive developers. They should immediately be able to get over the lack of "tooling sugar" to see the value IronRuby has to offer. I'd start with the testing aspects, Cucumber, RSpec, etc. as well as Rake and its superior abilities in creating dev tools and build automations and things, then move on to scripting & automating existing .NET apps. I think RoR and other pure Ruby concepts are a bit out of range for most .NET folks just now, and anyway if they did want to start building those kinds of pure Ruby applications in IronRuby, they'd run into some brick walls and may drop out prematurely. From what I can tell IronRuby isn't quite ready for real, full scale Ruby development - a hefty portion of the things I try don't work on IronRuby yet, simply because the language isn't complete (String#unpack, File#flock, etc) and because the community hasn't caught up (DataMapper integrations, C# ports of native libraries, etc). Finally, you may want to ask the JRuby community how they did it. Of coure, Java devs by and large may be much more comfortable with command line work, but the situation is largely the same I would think. All in all, though, I think it is still very early to expect too much. Hopefully, as the early adopter types start to pick this thing up and get excited about it, they will spread the excitement - I think it is more likely to get into people's heads that way, rather than user group presentations. At the same time, MS will continue to improve their tooling, JetBrains may build their RubyMine product as a VS integration when IronRuby is more mature, and demos can get flashier. That will help some too. That's my guess anyway. From: ironruby-core-boun...@rubyforge.org [mailto:ironruby-core-boun...@rubyforge.org] On Behalf Of Shay Friedman Sent: Monday, November 02, 2009 7:07 AM To: ironruby-core Subject: [Ironruby-core] How do you convince .Net developers to use IronRuby? Hi there, In the last month I had 3 sessions about IronRuby, all of them in front of .Net audience. I really believe in the IronRuby but I find it very very hard to pass that to existing .Net developers. I try to show the benefits of using IR - getting things done faster (like POCs, internal tools), using REPL, using IR abilities from C#, IR and Silverlight (like Gestalt), unit testing, RoR... Most of the .Net devs are very conservative and are not willing to get out of their familiar development environment even when they see the clear benefits of the new technology. They feel that using IronRuby will take everything they love from them - Visual Studio, Ctrl+F5, the sacred intellisense, etc. That's about what happens during a session: - No Visual Studio integration: 50% of the audience are willing to leave. - No compilation: more 25% have just lost interest. - Intensive command line work: more 15% are shutting down. That leaves about 10 perecent of the audience that just think of using IronRuby, most of them decide not to eventually. My question is - how do you suggest to present IronRuby to .Net developers? and to the team members - does Microsoft expect that existing .Net devs will start using IronRuby? Thanks! Shay. -- -------------------------------------------------- Shay Friedman Author of IronRuby Unleashed http://www.IronShay.com Follow me: http://twitter.com/ironshay
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