Tonight I was chatting a bit with a co-worker about IronPython and IronRuby and decided to have a look at IronRuby.  Getting started is supposed to be pretty easy.

1. Checkout the IronRuby source from RubyForge

svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/ironruby

2. Install Ruby via the Ruby 1-click installer: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller/
3. Open a Visual Studio Command Prompt
4. Install the pathname2 gem by running the following from the command line:

gem install pathname2

5. Compile IronRuby by running:

rake compile

Unfortunately when running "rake compile" I get the following errors.

C:\Development\ironruby\trunk>rake compile
(in C:/Development/ironruby/trunk)
Read in 17 resources from "C:\Development\ironruby\trunk\src\microsoft.scripting
\Math\MathResources.resx"
Writing resource file...  Done.
Read in 49 resources from "C:\Development\ironruby\trunk\src\microsoft.scripting
\Resources.resx"
Writing resource file...  Done.
rake aborted!
Command failed with status (0): [csc /nologo /noconfig /nowarn:1591,1701,17...]
C:/Development/ironruby/trunk/rakefile:197:in `exec'
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

I did a little digging around to see if I could find out what was causing the above problem but didn't uncover anything.  In hopes of making some progress and seeing ruby running on top of the CLR, I decided to try and compile using the IronRuby VS.NET solution file. Compiling IronRuby using the VS.NET solution file built everything into the \bin\debug folder.  Once that was done I was able to run rbx.exe and do a little experimentation.  rbx didn't behave like I expected and seemed to be acting pretty flaky but I was able to put in some simple Ruby expressions and see the results I expected.  Now that I have the source downloaded and compiled I'm going to dig into things a bit more to see where things stand. 

Some resources that I came across that might be useful to others include:

• http://ironruby.rubyforge.org/
• http://rubyforge.org/projects/ironruby
• http://www.ruby-forum.com/forum/34
• http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/ironruby-core/