can ironruby nuget package be installed then used in a vanilla VS2012
.net, c#, ironruby
Solution
I've realized a simple proof of concept at https://github.com/edymtt/csscss-from-ironruby that shows in a console application how to use IronRuby to run the source code of `csscss` to analyze a CSS loaded from a file. To achieve this result I've started from this SO question -- you can find the additional resources I've used in the comments of the program. I haven't tried this code in a ASP.net MVC site -- anyway this sample should be a good starting point.
This solution is a bit cumbersome to maintain, since you have to manually put the sources for the `csscss` and its dependent libraries in the solution. An alternative solution is to install Ruby on the machine, install `csscss` using `gem`(so it download the dependencies automatically) and to invoke the program from .NET -- I'll also show this approach in the sample. Note that this solution requires that you could install Ruby on the web server.
UPDATE 2013-09-02 18:15 UTC Following the suggestion from Zach Moazeni I've been able to semplify the approach that used IronRuby to run `csscss` and I've updated accordingly the proof of concept. In a nutshell:
- outside the .NET program I've used bundler to download `csscss` and `json` (and dependent gems) to a local folder of the project;
- in the .NET program I've written a function to discover all the paths of the libraries in the gem folder created by `bundler` (by finding the `gems` folder and then including for each subfolder the `lib` folder, this algoritm was inspired by this SO thread);
- I've passed this list of paths to the IronRuby interpreter before launching `csscss`.
This approach should conjugate the ability to use only .NET to run the program with the ease of the update given by `gem` and `bundler`.
Problem
I am interested in using a ruby script (https://github.com/zmoazeni/csscss) withing an ASPNET MVC site. I have no previous experience with ruby so my question could be naive. Is it possible to import the ironruby nuget package and execute the ruby scripts? My goal would be to put a .net wrapper around the ruby script(s) and put the output out as HTML. So far I have tried Googling getting started with ironruby but have not found much that I understand and could get working, (yes that sound vague, but I don't know ruby or ironruby and couldn't find any good simple guides on getting started).