Ruby Tuesday #22 : First steps with IronRuby and Silverlight

With the recent release of Silverlight 2 and the latest version of the Dynamic Languages SDK, now seemed like a good time to write a simple Silverlight application in Ruby.  Once you’ve got all the bits downloaded, installed and extracted, find yourself a fresh new folder and open a command prompt.  I should note that I put the scripts folder of the Dynamic Languages SDK on my path variable before opening the command prompt.  At the prompt type:

sl ruby <application_name>

replacing <application_name> with the name of your application.  To see it running type:

server /b

Navigate to index.html and there’s the app running.

Right – time to fiddle.  Open the app.xaml file and add a button.  Here’s my xaml file:

<UserControl x:Class="System.Windows.Controls.UserControl"
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
  <Grid x:Name="layout_root" Background="White">
    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
      <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
      <ColumnDefinition Width="100"/>
    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
    <Grid.RowDefinitions>
      <RowDefinition Height="100"/>
      <RowDefinition Height="*"/>
    </Grid.RowDefinitions>
    <TextBlock x:Name="message" FontSize="30" Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="0" />
    <Button Margin="4,4,4,4" FontFamily="Verdana" FontSize="18" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="0"
Content="Push Me!" x:Name="rubyButton" />
  </Grid>
</UserControl>

Now, we just need to do something when the button is clicked.  Open the app.rb file and update the initialise method so it looks like this:

def initialize
  message.text = "Welcome to Ruby and Silverlight!"
  rubyButton.click do |sender, e|
    message.text = "Hello World!"
  end
end

Reload your app, click the button and whoop with delight.  Worth looking at index.html in an editor – the documentation will prove helpful.