Following Scott Guthrie’s introduction to Microsoft’s new MVC framwork, Scott Hanselman presented a proof-of-concept he’d worked up showing how Python or Ruby could be used as the language for the MVC framework. It was based on an internal July release of the DLR bits.
About all one could really take away from this is that with the DLR, you’ll be able to do mixed CLR / DLR projects just as today you can do mixed language projects. Scott debugged through call stacks that wove a path between C# and Iron Python methods.
Scott also showed a Ruby proof of concept actually written by Phil Haack, which bypasses the entire ASP.NET engine to generate pages in pure Ruby. Again, it was mostly a demonstration of the flexible possibilities embodied by the DLR.
It seems that Microsoft is growing less and less parochial … it’s no longer just C# and VB.NET. The Microsoft folks at this conference are talking comfortably and knowledgeably about Ruby, Python, Boo, MVC, and various open source products like the major unit testing frameworks, and making an effort to embrace the thought leaders in the community. No matter how much you care (or not) about the so-called ALT.NET technologies and methodologies, I think this is a Good Thing.
There was some spirited discussion about Rails being runnable under IIS. Microsoft says it’s their goal that Iron Ruby will run Rails on IIS. They have some concerns about Rail’s inherent lack of support for multiple threads and warn that although Iron Ruby itself is shaping up as overall the fastest Ruby implementation, Rails itself will still be constrained by its single-threaded nature, and that’s something the Rails people will have to fix.
