For my entire existence as a developer I have solely used Microsoft development environments. Granted I have built / debugged / written in other languages like PHP, Perl, Java, etc. But frankly I hate those languages. They are messy, spaghetti like coding environments. In all my years of doing System Administration work from the days when my dad used to give me computers to take apart and put back together I have used Windows. I know the ins and outs of Windows Server machines and Windows networking. That is primarily why I became a .NET developer … I already knew the environment.

After all my reluctance towards the open-source community I think I’ve finally been convinced. I’m on Rails. I will still do .NET programming because that’s what I’m good at. But I am intrigued and interested in Rails. Not because it’s the hot thing right now but because it really does create a better and more productive development environment.

That being said I have a great chance to document my progress and the process I will go through to learn how to build, debug, and manage Rails applications. I haven’t decided if it will be at GANB or not because I generally like to leave the programming posts off this blog and save them for my personal site.

For now, here’s how I am starting.

I downloaded InstantRails for development to run on my workstation. Again, being a Windows guy with only Windows Servers that run IIS, I have no Linux machines at home. This is my answer for that. Again, not to be too technical you can find out more information at RubyForge.

Secondly I needed hosting so I could share my progress with the world. And if I actually created an app in Rails, I would want people to use it. In order to prevent the certain catastrophe of running IIS and Apache side by side in production (I’ve done it sucks) I am looking elsewhere for help. In comes FreeOnRails, a free rails hosting solution.

And in order to track my progress I will need a CMS mechanism such as a blog. If I don’t do the regular posts here, I will be running Typo at FreeOnRails. Typo is a Rails blogging solution that looks to be pretty kick ass.

And last but not least, I’ve purchased Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide

We’ll see how it goes and I’ll keep you posted. Sorry for the technical jargon.