This is something I’ve been waiting for ever since I got hocked with Ruby on Rails: An easy way to install it on a windows machine. I deploy on Linux-machines, I usually also developed on such a maschine. Since I am told, that I’m generally to poor to buy the MacBook Pro I desire so much, I’m stuck with windows on the Desktop-Machine.
Now I have finally found something, that makes Ruby on Rails on Windows really usable for the first time! It’s the RailsInstaller Project from EngineYard (railsinstaller.org).
It has treated me very good so far, just one minor problem: It assumes, that you have a clip.exe on your system, which seems to be deployed with all Server versions since 2003 and Windows 7 appearantly. Since I’m still on XP, I had to download it manually (see this tip here, or download it directly from Microsoft) and put it in my c:\windows\system32 folder. Now it’s working like magic. 
I’m very excited to see, how this goes on for me and what functionality I can actually use on windows – which usually lacks the c-bindings a lot of gems still have.
Update #1: It turns out that you can even install native extensions. The RailsInstaller includes a package called the “Development Kit” (here on github) which includes the necessary headers, libs etc for compiling the extension on windows. Brilliant!
