Dan Appleyard » Ruby

Microsoft’s NuPack – .Net’s Gem Manager?

Dan — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:45:25 +0000

Today Microsoft announced the betas of several new projects – ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta 1, WebMatrix Beta 2, and NuPack. NuPack is a free open source package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use .NET libraries in your projects. Once installed, you can open a new “” within Visual Studio and enter the line “Add-Package [name of library]“. NuPack will search online, download, add a reference to the library to your project, and setup the project’s configuration file.

Isn’t that doing the same thing as Ruby’s Gem Manager?

Basically it is. But so what? Some people say that Microsoft has been trying to play catch-up with Ruby / Rails for the last year or so. Once again, I say “So What?”. Don’t we as developers want improvements in our languages/platforms? These are just my initial thoughts about this interesting new project. Once I have played around with NuPack, I am sure I will much more to say. Until then, here are some links for your reading pleasure.

Dazed and confused with cucumbers

Dan — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 06:53:34 +0000

This week, I have decided to learn Ruby as a new programming language. I decided that since I am mainly a web developer, I should set up Ruby on Rails and go that route. For those that do not know, Ruby is the general language, and Rails is the web framework for Ruby. I found the install of both Ruby and Rails very straightforward and simple. Once I had both installed on my machine, I decided to checkout what Tekpub had in terms of learning Ruby on Rails. Tekpub is a website aimed at developers with video tutorials on various technologies (Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, etc.). I started watching the first of a series showing Ruby on Rails. I was following the instructor (Rob Conery), and when he got to the section of installing a testing gem (kind of like a package in Java, or assembly in .Net) called Cucumber, I got messed up. It was working for him, but not me! I was like “What the frak!” Well it turns out all the way in the last video in the series, he goes and says that people have mentioned that the steps in the first video (the one I was at) did not work for them. He then goes and shows what he should have done, and yada yada yada. Well, in the end I got Cucumber to install correctly on my machine.

Once I got it installed correctly, I started playing a bit with Cucumber. It seems very interesting. Cucumber follows the concept of Behavior Driven Development. As it says in its website: “Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests, and development-aid – all rolled into one format”. I haven’t gotten too far into it, but once I do, I am sure I will share more about it.

The chosen language is Ruby

Dan — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:19:00 +0000

It has been awhile since I wrote about my examination of what language to learn first after using .Net for years. I narrowed it to PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Java. So far, I had gone over all but Java. The reason I did not do Java is because I felt that the examination code I would have written in Java was basically C#. That would not have really brought anything new to light for me. That is not really attractive to me for a new language. I was now left with PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby. I found that Perl was very cryptic in its syntax, PHP was just for web, and that Python and Ruby are very similar. I had Python and Ruby in the top two. Researching what people thought about the two languages, I found that Ruby had the advantage. Since I take what the development community thinks seriously, I have chosen to learn Ruby. I will probably try to learn Rails as well.

A belated look at Ruby

Dan — Sun, 23 May 2010 04:32:45 +0000

Last Sunday I went over a list of possible programming languages to learn. It ended with me decided to learn all of them, but unsure as to what to learn first. I decided to go over each of them and figure out what I thought about them. How would I do this? What I have decided to do is see how complex it is to do the same thing in each language. What better to test out a language than to create a class? Wednesday, I went over the PHP implementation. Today is Ruby’s turn.

Ruby Class

class Person
 
	def initialze(firstName, lastName, age)
		@firstName = firstName
		@lastName = lastName
		@age = age
	end
 
	def IntroduceYourself
	    response = "Hello, my name is " + @firstName + " " + @lastName
            response = response + ", and I am " + @age + " year(s) old."
            return response
	end
 
end

Ruby Implementation

dan = Person.new("Dan", "Appleyard", 27)
puts dan.IntroduceYourself

My Thoughts

Rubys seems similar to Python. Since I liked Python, I like Ruby. At this point in my limited knowledge of these languages, I don’t really see the differences between Ruby and Python. My final examination will be that of Java.

No look at Ruby today

Dan — Fri, 21 May 2010 03:27:26 +0000

I have been too busy today to mess around with Ruby. Will try tomorrow.

Learn a new programming language

Dan — Sun, 16 May 2010 21:18:23 +0000

I want to broaden my development skills. I am too focused on .Net technologies. There are so many other options out there – Ruby, PHP, Java, Perl, Python, etc. That being said, I have recently decided to learning a new programming language. Currently, I know VB.NET, C#, and JavaScript – pathetic I know. Of those options out there, which one should I learn? According to eWeek.com, I should learn them all. The funny thing is, I wrote that orginal list of languages before I even found this article. While the article has been around coming on four years now, I think it is still a valid list (even though I personally disagree the distinction between AJAX and JavaScript as two separate languages).

Now the original question has changed from “what language should I learn” to “what language should I learn first”. Some would say that since I know C# Java would have the easiest learning curve. I don’t know quite yet. What are the pros and cons of each language? Each day this week I will talk about one language and go over the pros and cons of learning it. These will be MY pros and cons – not the standard pros and cons of each language.

Tomorrow – Perl!