Huw Collingbourne of Sapphire Steel Software wrote in with news of the release of Ruby In Steel Text Edition (copious screenshots included), a new edition of their "ultimate Ruby on Rails IDE." The key difference between this edition and the old $199 edition is that you no longer need a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio installed as it comes with the all-new Visual Studio 2008 Shell for free!

Effectively, then, Ruby In Steel Text Edition is a $49 professional level Ruby and Rails IDE based upon VS2008 but with no dependency on a pre-installed Visual Studio. The $199 Developer Edition is still available, and comes with the ultra-fast "Cylon" debugger and Intellisense code completion.

Last time Ruby In Steel was mentioned here on Ruby Inside, quite a few people complained about the high purchase price but it seems they've tried quite hard to put together something solid for under $50, and now that Visual Studio's IDE is, effectively, bundled in for free, this is a steal (unless you're perfectly happy with the many free Eclipse / NetBeans derived IDEs, of course!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Cool, Tools, Windows Specific. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.