John walked through some of the cool stuff they are doing with IronRuby. He started out showing how you can host the ruby engine in a C# application, in just a couple lines of code he wrote a WPF irb clone. He also showed how with C# 4.0 you can run the ruby engine, send it code, then reach in and get specific variables and pull them back out (using the dynamic keyword).

He went on to show accessing C# from IronRuby and even monkey patching a CLR class from IronRuby, which was pretty cool. Corey Haines asked to confirm and you can even undef methods from a CLR class from IronRuby. (of course they would only be modified from a DLR perspective)

John also shared some interesting statistics, I believe they were that the language rubyspecs were around 93% passing and the lib specs were around 78% complete. He also mentioned that performance right now is mostly better than MRI with some that is worse but that they haven't spent alot of time on it yet. IronRuby and the DLR clock in at only 2MB when compressed, which is fairly impressive.

There was a question about 1.9 which he basically said they weren't even thinking about yet, which is worrisome since it will probably be out fairly soon and I would at least like to hear that they have a plan on how to implement it. (otherwise they will always be behind)

I have to say I was very happy to not see any Silverlight in the talk, there was a decent amount of XAML and WPF but that is OK. I just don't want to see IronRuby and Silverlight joined at the hip, which for the first year or so seemed to be the case.

-James