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.