As I continue on my quest to get more information about IronRuby, I figured it was worth figuring out what needs to happen in order to contribute code back into the project.  The source code for IronRuby is synced with RubyForge every so often, and patches to the source code can be submitted on the RubyForge project here.  Before making any contributions to IronRuby a contributor agreement must be electronically signed.  John Lam's post to the IronRuby mailing list can be found here, and the actual agreement is available at: http://www.ironruby.net/contributor.pdf

The agreement appears to be pretty staight forward, the main point worth attention is that you grant Microsoft all rights to the contribution.

For good and valuable consideration (including without limitation the opportunity to contribute to the Project), receipt and sufficiency of which is hereby acknowledged, Assignor hereby assigns and agrees to assign to Microsoft its entire right, title,
and interest (including all intellectual property rights) in the Contributions.

Microsoft then licenses the contribution back to you to do with it as you wish.

Microsoft grants You a non-exclusive license under the rights assigned to Microsoft in Section 3 to use, reproduce, modify, license or otherwise distribute, and exploit the Contribution as You see fit.

If you're interested in contributing you need to send an email to ssiadmin at microsoft.com requesting to be added as a contributor to the IronRuby project.  I sent an email this morning so I'm not sure what happens next, but I'm assuming the electronic signing of the contributor agreement will be the next step.

I've been digging around IronRuby a bit lately, checking out the source, the specs, and writing very minimal code into rbx to see if it works as expected.  Over the next couple weeks I'm going to try and dig a little deeper into IronRuby in an attempt to get a better feel for where it is, what I might be able to use it for, as well as to experiment with some ideas I've had over the last couple months. 

When I first downloaded IronRuby I did so on my Mac in hopes that I'd be able to cruise around the source in TextMate, compile with Mono, and avoid having to fire up a VM whenever I wanted to experiment.  My initial attempts, albiet not very focused, were a failure.  Fortunately within the last week or two I came across Seo Sanghyeon's IronRuby on Mono How to.

The first step is to download and install Mono 1.9.  Once you have Mono installed you need checkout the IronRuby source from RubyForge and then download and apply this patch that Seo created.  Finally run: rake compile mono=1 and assuming everything goes well you'll be greeted with another command prompt which you can use to fire up rbx (aka IronRuby's irb) and begin experimenting.

svn co http://ironruby.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk ironruby
cd ironruby
patch -p0 < patch-mono-r93
rake compile mono=1
mono build/mono_debug/rbx.exe