The third and last day of ALT.NET Seattle was a short one for me. My poor extremely patient wife was not feeling well today so I had to leave right at lunch time. But before I left, I did manage to attend a great session by John Lam and Jimmy Schementi on “Adding Scripting Support to .NET Applications”. In fact, you can watch the session here via Kyte.tv.

John and Jimmy covered the topic of hosting IronRuby to provide “end-user” ability to script an application. The classic example is that many 3-D games, Half-Life for example, write their core 3-D engines etc… in C++. However, they often provide a scripting language such as LUA which allows others to script the behavior of objects in the game, as these types of things change often and you want the flexibility to do so in a lightweight language.

The same may be true in an enterprise application where you want to write the whole app in C#, but perhaps allow configuring the rules engine using IronRuby.

I showed up to the session late and asked if John and Jimmy were going to show a demo. Unfortunately, they didn’t have one prepared, so I gave everyone a sneak preview of a demo where I have an ASP.NET MVC app hosting IronRuby in a manner where I think some C# developers will see the value. It was just a little something I’ve been hacking away at in my copious free time and hope to present at the MVP Summit and Mix. I won’t talk about it yet as I have a bit more work I want to do before I put it on my blog.

Before the session Aaron Jensen showed me some really cool stuff he’s doing with Spark View Engine and ASP.NET MVC. After the session, Eric Hexter showed me some neat stuff his company has been doing with T4 templates and ASP.NET MVC. This really got me fired me up with ideas for the next version of ASP.NET MVC to help support such efforts.

One of the coolest things at this conference was the usage of Kyte.tv. I honestly hadn’t heard of it until last week, but everyone was recording sessions live via Kyte.tv. After going home early, I was able to get back online and watch a couple more sessions recorded by Scott Hanselman when my son and wife took a nap. How cool was that.