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I joined the VB/Ruby dev team in 1992, first as an intern and then full-time a couple years later and stayed in the team thru 1999 / VB6. I implemented the Data control and some of the data binding logic for VB 3.0. It was such a special team and code base - even 30 years later I still fondly remember my HDesks, HDeskrefs, and Gizmos. We tried hard to get the Ruby forms engine running on the (what became the) .NET/CLR runtime - but alas it was not to be.

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Hey Stephen, I wrote the original article. Had no idea that MS actually tried to port the Ruby forms engine to the CLR—what a fun twist. Did it end up being too difficult technically, or were there other factors that killed it?

We kept the Ruby forms engine as unmanaged code written in C/Win32/COM and tried to integrate it with Basic code compiled and running on the CLR, but it didn't work very well. There were a lot of problems back then (this was 25 years ago now, a couple years before .NET 1.0 shipped) with CLR/COM interop. One particular problem I recall was that the interop layer did not support calling event handlers via IDispatch which the Ruby forms engine required.

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