Warning: When installing Ruby using “One-Click Ruby Installer”, it replaces your path with “c:rubybin”, if you don’t take a back up of your path variable before install then you will be in for a nasty surprise (Yea, I had that)
Since Ruby was making a lot of sound on the blogosphere (both favourable and unfavourable), I thought of checking it out. Till now my concentration was mainly on C++ and Dot-Net along with getting started on MPI-CH framework, so I was looking into the availability of development tools along with a good IDE and learning materials for and was pleasantly surprised at the high quantity. For starters, you can get Ruby at http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller/ which comes with the standard parser, two free IDE’s, RubyGems (packaging utility) and documentation. Even though there is a free IDE present in the package, I find the idea of integrating the Ruby development in Visual Studio would be a better idea and Ruby in Steel does just that. Since I already have VertigoServ installed (a windows AMP package), I did not consider using the Instant Rails.
After playing with ruby, check out Erik Veenstra‘s Distributing Rails Applications, A Tutorial to know about a way to distribute your ruby applications as an single EXE file (exe on windows, it can also create single execute files for other platforms as well).