Yesterday I was banging my head against a (virtual) wall because of frustration trying to debug a WF-based workflow for SharePoint when I thought of a cool idea: why not use IronRuby and its REPL console to explore the SharePoint object model? That would be cool and it would eliminate the need for me to whip out throwaway console programs in C# just for trying things out with the SharePoint object model before I actually code them.

In just a few minutes after installing IronRuby 0.9.0 on our development server (actually it didn't have to install -- I just unzipped it to a directory) I was able to quash the bug! Now why didn't I think of it before? And why am I only updating my blog now after so many months?

There are some pain points with interoperating with .NET objects with IronRuby, namely the long namespaces. I'm thinking of ways to simplify things and probably even leverage metaprogramming qualities of the Ruby language to make it easier. I'll post them here in this blog when I get to refine them a bit. Stay tuned!