What is the best Ruby on Rails environment for a Visual Studio user?

Question

I've been a Visual Studio user since 1997, and used VB 3.0 before that. My whole professional life has been spent inside the Microsoft development environments.

Now I would like to branch out into Ruby on Rails to try something different, and it doesn't have the kind of vendor support that C# does (for very obvious reasons).

For someone coming from the world of Visual Studio, what is the best total environment (IDE, tools, gems, etc) to set up for RoR development on Windows that would make the transition easier?

Answer 1

Netbeans! Its got the most similar features. I developed for years in VS before the switch. It was the only one that I really liked and felt comfortable using.

Netbeans.org

Answer 2

If you want to stick with Visual Studio, you can always use the Ruby in Steel plugin by Sapphire Steel. The best traditional IDE for Ruby is probably NetBeans, it even has a special stripped-down Ruby Edition.

However, note that unlike less expressive languages like Java, C# or VB.NET, you can not only get by, but even be more productive with a good text editor than with a traditional static IDE. IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse and Visual Studio are designed with static languages in mind, and trying to force Ruby into that ecosystem is just unnatural.

There is a nice article on The Best Environment for Rails on Windows by Fabio Akita that you might want to read. While I don't agree with everything he writes (mostly because I don't use Rails), it is a pretty good introduction of how you might want to setup a development environment specifically for Rails.

Answer 3

I use netbeans for two reasons. I like the visual studio style navigation pane and for the debugger.

Be warned though, Netbeans is pretty slow. It doesn't bother me that much because I too am slow.

I also dislike the filename tabs because you can easily be confused about what file you are working on since there is no directory information unless you mouse over the tab.

Answer 4

You might find that RadRails (Aptana) is an excellent choice: (http://www.aptana.com/rails) - NOTE: Make sure you look at the Features and Comparisons tab as RadRails has many compelling features. Additionally, I have used Aptana Studio for JQuery development and it help me to be very productive.

I have tried Netbeans and it seemed very promising as well but that is mentioned many times so I thought to offer another approach I was aware of.

Hope this helps!