A couple of months ago I was starting to read about IronRuby, and while thinking about what my first little pet project should be I saw a tweet from a guy who was enjoying the combination with Silverlight. I gave the idea some thought and liked the idea of using a dynamic language to make a rich internet application. So after reading IronRuby UnleashedI started out doing a version 2 of my dotnetnerd.dk site – which is just a little toy selfpromotion site.
Getting started was pretty straight forward because with IronRuby there is a small webserver called Chiron, which can make a project template. All you have to do is open a cmd, and go to the library where IronRuby is installed and type script\sl.bat ruby <projectpath>
Armed with my starter template I began playing around and got my layout in place. I also tried using some 3rd party components by referencing some dll’s and all that basic stuff. Most of it went smoothly, but I did run into an assembly (Flickr.net) that threw an exception when used with Silverlight/IronRuby. Using it from a console project in IronRuby worked fine, so I quickly decided to just go directly against the flickr api using the .NET WebClient class. Running the site from chiron was as easy as calling script\chr.bat /d:<projectpath> /b:index.html
When I had the first couple of pages ready and had written a picturegallery showing the last 5 pictures I have uploaded to flickr I wanted to get the site deployed, so I would no longer depend on chiron. From my book and by looking at blogs it seemed to be smooth sailing, because chiron has a function that makes a .xap file which is all you need. To my surprise when I referenced the .xap file from the html file in my my project it looked like it loaded, but then just stopped at 100% without showing my actual site. I felt pretty stuck, because I had no exception or anything to go on, and my site ran fine when I was using chiron.
I then wrote an email to “Iron” Shay Friendman, who wrote the book that I was using as my inspiration. I thought it was worth a shot, and that I could not be the only one with that problem. Later that day he wrote back, and (as the nice guy he is) told me that he did not know the solution off the top of his head but he would look at it as soon as he had a couple of available hours. A few days later he had found a solution, and it turnes out a few things need to be done differently when running it outside of chiron. So this is basically what I want to share with this post :)
What you need to do is:
1) If your .rb files contain references like “app.xaml” it should be changed to app\app.xaml – in other words the references should be from the root of the solution and not from the app folder where the file is located.
2) Make the .xap file using the command script\chr /d:<projectpath> /z:<projectpath>\app.xap
3) In the index.html file where the .xap file is referenced find the like starting with <param name="initParams".
Change its value attribute to "start=app\app.rb,reportErrors=errorLocation".
And easy as 1-2-3, your site should work when running the index.html file.
Shortly put it really has been a fun project, and I really like the IronRuby and Silverlight combination, so it is definately not my last project where I will combine the two.
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