Ruby on Windows

I've written before about using Ruby with Microsoft's ADO technology to query Excel workbooks as databases.
This works well---most of the time. But you may occasionally bump into data type issues, where you find that Excel/ADO treat a specific column as a different data type than you expected....

I've talked in the past about managing mail messages in your Inbox, and about saving email attachments to your hard drive. A reader recently asked about saving a mail message as a file on your hard drive.
This can be done by calling the MailItem's SaveAs() method. This method takes two arguments. The first argument is a string indicating the full path and filename to which you want to save the message. The second argument is an integer that indicates...

JRuby 1.6 has just been released and, among the many new features, the JRuby installer for Windows now includes the win32ole library.
This is good news for those of us that frequently use Ruby's win32ole module to automate Excel, Word, and a variety of other Windows applications and processes. Now you have the option of running your code on the JVM....

As recently reported, the NetBeans IDE team has decided to drop support for Ruby (and Rails) from NetBeans 7.0.
I have received many good suggestions from readers, with RedCar and RubyMine getting a lot of love.
But wait! What's that? It sounds like trumpets off in the distance... and hoofbeats....