Using Factory Girl from C# with IronRuby for building .NET objects
Recently at work, I've been using TDD to drive out the design for some WPF View Models. Part of what I'm doing is filtering a collection based on various properties of the elements in the collection. Of course, I've needed to build up that collection first. I'd come up with a very limited method using Action<T> to set properties when the builder method was called. While this worked for my needs, I got to thinking about a library I've used a couple of times on Rails projects: Factory Girl.
On numerous occasions working with C# on .NET, I've thought to myself man, I really wish I had something like Factory Girl here!
. So, last night/this morning, I set out to create a spike solution to determine the feasibility of hosting IronRuby within my C# library, thus allowing me to use Factory Girl to build POCOs for me. The result:
OH YEAH!
Well, at least for the Factory.build method, but that's all I was interested in for this spike.
I’ve put my code up on github for your perusal. For this particular solution I don't think you'll need Visual Studio 2010, but you will certainly need .NET 4 installed, as well as IronRuby. Also note that IronRuby needs to be installed into C:\IronRuby unless you want to edit the app.config and fix up some references.
I'm excited now about the possibilities of utilizing other Ruby libraries in my .NET projects!