Three years after Microsoft first announced it was dipping a toe into the Ruby implementation waters, IronRuby 1.0 has been released. IronRuby is Microsoft's attempt at bringing Ruby natively to the DLR that runs on top of .NET (and Mono), and with version 1.0, it has finally reached maturity with Jimmy Schementi calling it the "first stable version."

IronRuby 1.0 is available to download in two different forms - a .NET 4.0 Windows installer or ZIP file, and a .NET 2.0 SP1 Windows installer or ZIP file. The .NET 4.0 version has faster startup times and is more feature complete (in terms of .NET integration) but the .NET 2.0 SP1 version will run on the Mono cross-platform, open source .NET platform.

The IronRuby team are pushing stability and maturity as big themes for the 1.0 release. Their progress is certainly encouraging. As of today, IronRuby passes 85.95% of RubySpec (as opposed to MRI Windows Ruby's ruby.exe score of 97.84%) with most of the gap in the library tests. IronRuby does particularly well with the language tests (98.31% pass vs 99.89% for ruby.exe). IronRuby promises Ruby 1.8.6 compatibility (mostly) and supports Rails 2.3.5.

We recently presented a walkthrough of using IronRuby and Silverlight to get Ruby in the Web browser and did an interview with IronRuby developer Jimmy Schementi so we're not going to go into detail here - check out those posts for more in-depth IronRuby knowledge.

New snippets that may also be of interest include an article on using FlexMock with C# types and a demo of how to embed Ruby files in a .NET assembly using embedded resources. The latter is particularly interesting as it allows Ruby source to be encoded and hidden away not only from other developers, but cranky sysadmins ;-)

Thanks to David Lake for help with this post.