Everywhere I look now it's Ruby, Ruby, Ruby and I think it's about time I figure out what's so great about this language. As a disclaimer, this tutorial will be pretty much the first thing I've ever done with Ruby, so the code might not be what a Ruby expert would consider the most efficient way to get things done. But I don't care, we all gotta learn somewhere, and I decided to learn by using Ruby's standard library to download and parse some XML.

Remember back many moons ago when we posted a previous tutorial about Excel document creation? Specifically, this one. It worked, but if you take a look at it again, that code was painful. And ugly. And required hooking up ruby with a Java library called JExcelAPI using RJB - which, really, is not something anyone actually wants to do. So today we are going to take a look at something else (that I think) is a lot nicer/cleaner for Excel document generation: a new web service specifically for document creation called Doc Raptor.

Everybody loves data, right? And where do we love data? Inside of spreadsheets! Specifically, Excel spreadsheets, which is the spreadsheet format that almost everyone can read and write. At some point or another, you have probably had to create a spreadsheet or report in code, and it can be painful and annoying if you don't have access to a good library. Today we are going to talk about how to get access to one of those decent libraries (JExcelAPI) if you are writing in ruby.

In pretty much every Silverlight tutorial on this site, we have some XAML with backing classes in C# code. This is because, well, that is the standard language for pretty much anything in the .NET world these days (and no, you can't say that VB.NET is the standard. What are you doing still writing in VB anyway!?). But what if, for some reason, you hate semicolons and strictly typed languages, but you still want to write a Silverlight application. Well, worry no more, there is an option available for you - the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and IronRuby/IronPython.