Not that it’s really all that new. The Ruby language was conceived back in 1993 and its first public distribution went online in ’95. Having mentioned Ruby in last month’s editorial, this month we begin a new series on Ruby programming for beginners. In the months ahead we shall have much more coverage of Ruby and shall even be releasing a free Ruby programming IDE called Steel for users of Visual Studio 2005. You can keep an eye on the progress on the development of the Ruby In Steel project at a separate site www.sapphiresteel.com.

Of course, not all users of Visual Studio are likely to be as keen on Ruby as we are. But maybe there is some other language that you’d like to see hosted by VS 2005. With a bit (well, let’s be honest – a lot) of effort, you can add VS support for just about any language under the sun. You can implement syntax colouring, language templates and many other dedicated features to let you edit and run projects and files just as you would edit and run one of the default languages such as VB .NET or C#. This month we start a new series exploring Visual Studio Integration in depth. And Dermot has more to say on the pros and cons of writing your own programming language in Bytegeist.

But if you’d prefer to use some other environment, maybe you should take a look at the latest release of Dolphin Smalltalk. Regular readers of Bitwise may recall that we ran a tutorial and hosted a free download of Dolphin Smalltalk 5 last year. This month, Dermot starts a series in which he begins Living With Dolphin Smalltalk X6. Will it overcome his reservations about Object Orientation, I wonder? He’ll be reporting back again in another couple of months…

Huw Collingbourne
(Editor)

In this month's bitwise...

Visual Studio Integration #1 : How to add a programming language to VS 2005
Introduction to Ruby - part one : Object Orientation fundamentals
Living With Smalltalk #1 : a first taste of Dolphin Smalltalk X6
VB Classic - Graphics and the GDI : start of a new programming series
Delphi Program Groups #1 : create your own Windows Start Menu
News: Borland dumps developer tools : where now for Delphi?
Camtasia Studio 3.1 : the latest version of this slick screen recording tool
Book Review: Squeak : Learn Programming With Robots : by Stéphane Ducasse
Mathematical Digressions : Wilf explores the maths of Ancient Egypt!
Bytegeist - Mind Your Language : writing a new programming language
Rants and Raves : Down on the farm