We released this in the very early days of Microsoft’s development of its implementation of the Ruby language for the dynamic language runtime under .NET. Initially we had anticipated a strong demand among .NET users for IronRuby which would have driven the further development of our IronRuby IDE. In fact, it has been our experience that the vast majority of our users continue to use the ‘standard’ version of Ruby (MRI), typically 1.8.x and we have had very little feedback relating to IronRuby.

Recently we opened up a discussion on our blog to try to ascertain whether or not there might be sufficient interest to justify the considerable effort which it would require to bring an IronRuby IDE onto a par with our main Ruby product, Ruby In Steel. While we did receive a few requests for further development, the response was far from overwhelming.

The IronRuby team at Microsoft has now announced plans to develop their own Visual Studio integration for IronRuby. While early indications are that this will not have the same features as our IronRuby IDE (as far as we are aware, there has been no mention of a visual designer or IntelliSense, for example), we nonetheless believe that the IronRuby market is not big enough to support two Visual Studio IDEs. We therefore must conclude that it is not a good use of our resources to commit to ongoing development of an IronRuby-specific IDE. Today we are announcing that there will be no further development of our IronRuby support.

I want to make it quite clear that this does not affect the continued development of our professional Ruby programming environment, Ruby In Steel. In a couple of weeks we shall launch our latest update to Ruby In Steel Developer (version 1.5) which, as before, will be free to all registered users. It is our continued commitment to provide the best editing and debugging environment available for standard Ruby.

Watch for more news here on the blog!