Posts Tagged Vm
Learning Ruby (on Rails)
Posted by John in Ruby and Rails on December 15, 2010
Most of my programming career has revolved around Microsoft technologies, starting with Visual Basic 3, up through the various versions to VB.Net, then switching to CSharp shortly after DotNet came out of beta.
I think I know the MS development stack fairly well and I like the direction they are moving in with the likes of MVC3 and Razor, Nuget etc. but it seems a fair amount of this ‘direction’ may be coming from the Rails community.
I have decided to give myself 2 weeks to ‘learn’ Rails, although I may get distracted by the Christmas holidays (and the fact that we will have an extra 6 kids and 3 adults staying with us for 2 weeks) and will record some of it here.
I have done a little research in preparation and bought a couple of ebooks from the prags:
They seem to be considered ‘definitive’ and cover the current versions of Rails (3.0.3) and Ruby (1.9.2).
The only other purchase I am likely to make is an IDE or editor. I code on a Mac, even when using Visual Studio so I have a few more options than most Windows users. The recommendation seems to be that, if you are on Windows, install a Linux VM for Ruby development. The favourite environment for the Mac looks to be Textmate although there are a few IDEs available such as JetBrain’s RubyMine and Aptana Studio, both of these are available for Windows, OS x, and Linux. I am a fan of JetBrain’s Resharper so will try RubyMine, the trial is 30 days so no need to make a purchase decision yet.
Other references that I expect to find useful over the next 2 weeks are:
Macs, Parallels and Keyboard Layouts
I am currently developing on a Mac, running Visual Studio on a Windows 7 VM courtesy of Parallels. There are a number of issues to resolve the first of which is the key mappings.
I am using the Mac bluetooth keyboard and a few keys are mapped incorrectly:
| Pressing this key | Results in this output |
| § | ` |
| ± | ¬ |
| @ | “ |
| “ | @ |
| \ | # |
| | | ~ |
When using OS X alt + 3 produces a # and alt + 2 produces a €. Unfortunately in Windows alt key combinations are normally used to launch menu items.
The answer to this is a free program from Microsoft called Keyboard Layout Creator.
Download and install this (on your Windows VM) then you can use it to create a correct layout. Once you have the layout you can create an installer to install your keyboard layout on however many VMs you like.
You can download the layout I created and open the file in the layout creator to build your own installer. I have also uploaded the installer I created (mostly for my own reference, I make no guarantees it will not fry your system, please use a good virus scanner etc.).
Once you have installed the layout open Keyboards and languages:
Then change the default input language and keyboard:
Any applications that are open need to be restarted, but then you should have all keys working correctly.
I have mapped # to Ctrl + alt + 3 and € to ctrl + alt + 2 which should work as long as the application you are in is not using them as shortcut keys.