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Ruby In Visual Studio with Ruby In Steel 2
Just launched

5 August 2011

by Huw Collingbourne

My company, SapphireSteel Software, has just launched Ruby In Steel 2 for Visual Studio 2010.

The first version of Ruby In Steel was released in 2007. At that time, Ruby 1.8 was the standard interpreter. In later updates (leading up to version 1.5) we also added support for JRuby. Even to this day, Ruby 1.8 is still widely used though 1.9 is also used. While Ruby In Steel 2 has been updated to support the latest 1.8 and 1.9 versions of Ruby (and the Rails framework) that hasn’t been the biggest challenge in this update. The major development work has gone into supporting Visual Studio 2010, which, from a development point of view, is significantly different from VS2008.

Ruby In Steel 2 can be used either with a commercial edition of Visual Studio 2010 or with a free ’Shell’ (but not Express) edition of Visual Studio.

The major features of Ruby In Steel 2 include:

 Fast ‘drill-down’ debugging with conditional breakpoints, watch variables, call-stack and more
 Powerful editing with Ruby code coloring and formatting
 IntelliSense
 Auto-expanding snippets plus a snippet editor
 Code navigation tools (Nav Bars/Go To Definition etc.)
 Integrated Ruby and IRB consoles
 Support for Ruby 1.8 and 1.9
 Class library navigation (The Ruby Explorer)
 Tight integration into Visual Studio 2010
 Integrated Rails development tools

For more information, see the SapphireSteel Software web site.