I just had a look at NU which is made to be for .NET what gems are for Ruby. Why should you care? Well if you are like me downloading new versions of miscellaneous open source projects and updating them along the way is not your favorite thing. It’s just tedious and seems to be a hassle for something so basic. This is where NU gives you a hand.

If you have IronRuby running simply open an command line and type:

igem install nu

Then when the installation is done go to the root of your projects folder (eg. D:) and type:

nu install <some_gem>

I started out running “nu install nunit” and “nu install nhibernate” and in less than a minute I had nunit, unhibernate, log4net, castle.core and castle.dynamicproxy2 unpacked to D:\lib like this.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been looking at quite a few new frameworks, tools and plugins. My focus area has mainly revolved around an app that I will be building that needs to pop and therefore it will make pretty heavy use of javascript and css - and of course by extention jQuery.

First of all dotLessCss deserves a mention, even though its actually not one things I looked at now. Basically it allows you to do some of the stuff you probably miss when working with css. Variables, mixins and nesting really helpes reduce all the repetitiveness. SquishIt is a little library I read about a while ago. It makes bundeling and minimizing javascript and css files as easy as can be. On top of that it also makes sure the files get versioned, so you won't run into users running on an old cached version.

In the category nice jQuery plugins I have looked at quite a few things. jQuery cookie addin makes it a no brainer to work with cookies. Watching a video from NDC I learned that newer browsers now support other ways of saving data on the client called sessionStorage and localStorage. As always the problem is compatibility, but there is a shim to fix this for IE6 and IE7, which are the main culprits.

I also looked at a few flashy jQuery addins, and FancyBox and Cycle solve a few of the things designers crave these days while being super simple to implement. Now that we are in the design department Cufón helpes you do font replacement easily, so you can use cool non websafe fonts.

Video is an area where there are quite a few options available, and it is becomming a jungle figure out which players support which formats and run in which browsers. Video for everybody is a simple way to implement videos in a way that will work across all the popular browsers. The idea is to use the html 5 video tag and then default to others where it is not supported. If being crossbrowser is not quite that important but designing the player is Silverlight has some great optios as well as flowplayer. Both are also easy to work with from javascript almost as straight foreward as the html 5 player API.

Lastly I saw a tweet about TopShelf and decided to try it out. Safe to say, I'll probably use it everytime I need to write a Windows Service from now on. It makes it just a little easier, and allows you to run your app either in a console or as a windows service.

Finally LINQ is supported in IronRuby now from v. 1.1 and I think it has been solved quite elegantly without any real syntactical gooeyness. Trying it out has been made very straight forward by looking at the 101 LINQ samples rewrite for IronRuby.

From day one LINQ has seemed a natural fit with IronRuby already having a similar approach with functions such as .each {|item| ...} which is accessible on anything that can be enumerated - very much like a big part of LINQ is extentions methods to the IEnumerable interface. No doubt there has been some challanges around how to map generics, extention methods etc between the languages, but syntactically it seems a natural fit.

products.where(lambda { |p| p.units_in_stock > 0 and p.unit_price > 3.00 }).each { |x| puts x.product_name }

Combining functional methods from LINQ with the existing Ruby methods just makes the "Integrated Query" syntax even better. So now we get a .each method with LINQ even though Microsoft originally didn't want to include it :)