Presented “Building .NET w/Ruby” at LCNUG

Had a great time presenting “Building .NET w/Ruby” at the Lake County .NET User Group in Grayslake, IL this evening.

Slides: Builds .NET with Ruby

The audience was relatively new to Ruby and Rake in general. So taking the introductory approach breaking down how Rake tasks are strung together and dependency chains are created before getting into the actual use of a library like Albacore was the right choice. I’m really happy with the questions from the audience. And there were some opinions defending MSBuild and even a new build engine from Microsoft that will support parallel builds. I’m very interested in learning about the build engine from Microsoft. I’d like to see what that might look like.

An interesting thing that Sergio Pereira brought up was how the Rails developers use Rake for a lot more than just builds. Pretty much any repetitive task will be handled via script automation through Rake. And that even led me to question why we still use BAT files in conjunction with Rake? Why not just do ALL the scripting via Rake and skip the BAT files? Going to look at converting some of my BAT scripts to just be Rake scripts.

Thanks to Clark Sells for lending me his very cool laser pointer+slideshow controller. And Scott Seely for hosting the event!

Sergio even snapped a shot of me talking.

Archive note: The original event photo is unavailable in this archive export.

Last but not least. Hosting your blog on GitHub is not crazy. And thanks for the beers Clark!