You have probably heard of Ruby in Steel, a nice new add-in for the Visual Studio 2005 that enables Ruby editing and debugging. Since version 0.7 they also support Rails in the shape of .rhtml color coding and verification. Nice! Just to be clear – this is not Ruby running on the .NET platform, it runs on the original VM. If you’d like to see a great preview of what it will be like to run Ruby on the .NET see the Ruby.NET website.

Small problem – I am guessing this is due to the prerequisite to the installation required by Visual Studio SDK – all the color coloring for your C# projects will vanish! Not that the color setting will be reset to the default, the settings themselves will disappear. Since one of the important reasons for me to use Reshaper is great coloring support (I’m a sucker for color coded source) I could not stand the new situation.

Fortunately, it is easy to fix the problem – just start Resharper installation again and choose the option to Repair the installation. The settings will show up again (all colors will unfortunately be reset to the defaults) while Ruby color coding settings will not disappear. Finally you get both of them. I only fear that the next installation of Steel might disrupt color coding again…

By the way, if you are not a Visual Studio person but like Eclipse better, there is a Ruby editing add-in for Eclipse and even RadRails aimed at Rails development. There definitely is no reason to complain about not having Ruby development tool-set any more (except when trying to make the existing ones better, of course ).