Microsoft recently announced demos of two exciting Ruby on Rails developments. The first is a Silverlight application integrated with Ruby on Rails and the second is a demo of Microsoft's .NET Rails implementation, somewhat weirdly named "IronRuby."

IronRuby lets developers access all of their favorite .NET libraries through Rails, in keeping with the standard .NET practice of cross-language coding.

Microsoft developer John Lam maintains that Microsoft's implementation should be judged first and foremost by their results, which is good, because that's just how I was planning to judge it:

"I have always maintained that you must judge us based on our actions and not our words. Running Rails shows that we are serious when we say that we are going to create a Ruby that runs real Ruby programs. And there isn’t any a more real Ruby program than Rails. This demonstrates that we’re true to the language, and that we’ve put compatibility above all else on our TODO lists."

Lam also admits that IronRuby still needs work, especially in memory management:

"Our performance is nowhere near where we expect it to be, particularly in startup of a large application like Rails. We are consuming much more memory than we would like to. But this is the price you pay when you put compatibility ahead of all other work. We’ve shown that we are willing to do what it takes to run Rails. Now we have to do the work to make it run better, and faster."

It's very cool to see Microsoft engineers coming out from behind the Iron Curtain and talking this candidly about their upcoming projects. It's also exciting to see a big player like Microsoft finally taking Ruby and Rails seriously. If nothing else, Microsoft's foray into Ruby development and .NET support for the language is yet another sign of how successful and popular a language Ruby has become within the RIA community.

If you haven't dabbled in Rails, there are many great resources on the internet to get started. I'd recommend checking out Tony Hillerson's talk on The Flex Show about about Rails and Flex integration as well as Why's (Poingnant) Guide to Ruby, which is probably the most entertaining programming resource ever written. Seriously.

Have any more great Ruby on Rails resources? Link 'em up in the comments.