Steel 0.7 was released today. In addition to last months debugging features, the new version adds support for rails project creation, gems, rake tasks, db creation (mysql & mssql). It finally supports rails and can even check for syntax errors in your rhtml files.
Next month is intellisense (aka code completion)!!
The only draw back to Steel is that it requires VS 2005 Standard or better. Express Editions are not supported. The reason is that the project is still fairly young and it would cost them $10,000 for the license to distribute it for the free version of VS. The good news for students however is that academic versions of VS can be had for $50 (see Studica.com).
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There is a serious lack of decent rails IDE’s on the landscape. RadRails, seems to be the best, but there are some quirks with it that need work before I’ll be totally sold (not to mention their site is frequently down). Unfortunately the editor of choice for many Rails developers is Textmate, and editor for OSX only. As it stands the market is wide open for a solid IDE to emerge. In fact I think it is imperative for a solid IDE to emerge if Rails is to move on from novelty and hype to being taken serious as development framework.
One IDE that looks promising is Sapphire Steel a Ruby and Rails IDE for Visual Studio. Things are still early in development, but it looks like this will be the IDE that will provide it all. Because it based on Visual Studio all the features that makes VS such a powerful development environment will come with the package (including intellisense).
Sunday Dermot posted that version 0.7 is about to be released with a lot of the core Rails features being implemented. This is great news as the dev team seems to be sticking close to their development road map. This being the case they should have a public release by years end.
I was so impressed by the potential of this IDE that I plunked down for copy of Visual Studio 2005 just so I could run it.
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