Ruby In Steel Developer - Overview

Here we provide a brief overview of just a few of the major features of Ruby In Steel...

Debugging

Ruby In Steel’s ultra-fast ‘Cylon’ debugger provides...

 Speed

Ruby and Rails debugging is notoriously slow. Not any longer. Ruby In Steel’s Cylon debugger blazes through your code.

 Breakpoints and Tracing

Step into/step-out/step-over code in Ruby and Rails applications.

 Hover and Drill-down

Drill-down debugging lets you look inside objects and expand arrays and hashes in the docked debugging windows, in the code editor or even right inside the interactive Ruby console!

 Conditional Breakpoints

Break when a condition (a test of one or more values) is met.

Other debugging features:
 Tracepoints
 JRuby Debugger
 Break on exception
 Break on hitcount
 Run macro on break

The debugger is supported by a range of tools and windows including:
 Watch
 Locals
 Autos
 Quick Watch
 Breakpoints
 Call Stack.

Editing

Ruby In Steel provides extensive syntax-aware editing for Ruby and Rails.

 Code Coloring and Code Folding

The code editors provide customizable coloring - even for Ruby code embedded into Rails Erb templates. Code folding operates on classes, modules, methods, if blocks and many other constructs - including user-defined collapsible regions...

 Bracket and Keyword/end Matching

Opening and closing brackets are highlighted. A keyboard shortcut lets you move you cursor between brackets or Ruby keyword/end pairs such as class...end and def..end.

Ruby In Steel also has...

 Snippets that auto-generate code blocks

 A Snippet editor to let you create your own snippets without coding
 Smart or Block indenting to auto-align align your code
 Automatic code formatting (a selected block or an entire document)
Plus all the editing features you would expect such as multi-level undo/redo, bookmarks, split-window editing and user definable macros.

IntelliSense

Ruby In Steel offers unparalleled analytical code completion and navigation tools for Ruby.

 Fast Code Completion Analyzes Code As It Is Written

Drop-down lists provide relevant and accurate information on the methods that are available to objects and classes (both those in the Ruby and Rails libraries and those that you write yourself).

Dual-page completion lists let you show class-specific detail, for clarity (see above) or the members of the class and all its ancestors, for completeness (see below).

Code completion is automatically triggered by a dot after an identifier and by the double-colon :: scope resolution operator. Completion lists may also be triggered by CTRL-Space. The IntelliSense engine analyzes code as it is written and updates completion lists as appropriate. You may optionally tailor completion lists by specifically omitting elements such as ancestor class methods, global variables and keywords. Notice that embedded (RDOC) documentation for members is shown in a tooltip. You can also hover over classes and methods in the editor to view RDOC.

 Tooltips and Parameter Completion

Enter an opening bracket after a method name to see a highlighted hint showing parameters and their types.

In cases where classes cannot be inferred, add ‘type assertion’ comments for extra IntelliSense.

Hover over any object to see its fully-qualified (including ‘nested modules’) class name.

 Speed Unlike some other Ruby editors, the Ruby In Steel code completion is fast!

Ruby On Rails Tools

Ruby In Steel has deep support for Ruby On Rails Development

It has project start-up wizards and (optionally) docked, tabbed and floating tool windows and dialogs such as:
 Generators
 Rake Tasks
 Gem Run

Tools and Wizards

 Fully integrated Ruby, Rails, Script and IRB consoles

 RDOC window shows formatted documentation when you hover over an object identifier in the editor

 The Ruby Explorer lets you navigate the class library - even into documentation extracted from C-source files

 Drop-down Navigation Bars over the editor for fast code navigation

Ruby In Steel projects are managed from the Visual Studio Solution Explorer. You can simply create, import or convert Ruby and Rails projects as well as add, move and delete files and folders. Ruby In Steel is fully configurable (colors, tab and formatting options etc.).

For more details, refer to The Feature List.

Minimum Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 Standard Edition or above; alternatively, use the Ruby In Steel ’All-in-one installer’ to install a free Ruby-language copy of Visual Studio 2010.