VS 2005 is a big fat, fatty sluggish beast of a memory hog, and so I question anyone's sense for using it for non .NET development, but I'll give it a shot...

Thanks for the interest. IDEs are all a matter of taste, of course. However, when we started using Ruby we came from a background in languages such as C#, Delphi and VB and we immediately wanted to be able to use development tools similar to those we were accustomed to. For professional Windows programmers, VS is the most widely used IDE and, given the very good (and, alas, very complicated) integration capabilities of VS 2005, that's the one we decided to work with. We'll be making releases or Ruby In Steel incrementally from now on. Beta 0.5 will be available shortly and we are already working on the next Beta (which should be available in May or June) which will have a few more goodies added ;-)

Wow - my first thought was that's an awfully expensive IDE to run a free language on! I'd really like to see a super awesome free IDE that has most of vs.net's features. holds breath

Good luck getting Ruby integrated into vs.net though. It's pretty cool and for developer's who've already had their companies dish out tons of money for an OS, it's pretty cool.

Heh - stupid repetition of "pretty cool" up there. I didn't mean to sound quite so stupid, but you know what I mean...