Updates part deux

Chad Redman is having difficulties getting the code in the vendor folder to override the gem installation. I've never really tried it where the gem and the vendor folder are loaded together, always one or the other, so I'm not sure what is going on there.

Matthew Stephure asked about avoiding restarting IIS - when I was playing around I would just kill the RubyW processes with Task Manager. However, Matt says that this is causing him 'ADO Invalid Class String' errors. I've never seen these before but it sounds like a full IIS restart is definitely safer than killing individual processes.

Matt (and Chad) did however test Chris Lang's hack to the allow query strings through the rewriter - apparently it works, although, as Chad noted, an arbitrary extra parameter is needed - Matt used a before_filter in application.rb to insert one.

Another problem - Matt noticed that when making an AJAX call the HTTP status appears to come back as 200 no matter what. Which isn't good.

Lastly, Jens was asking about Windows authentication. After asking me the question he then discovered the following link: http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/WindowsDomainAuthentication - no effort on my part and a solution has been found.

On a more personal note, I have two more things to think about:

Firstly, after looking at updating the "all-singing all-dancing WEBrick installer" so it can become the "all-singing all-dancing IIS/FastCGI installer" and getting nowhere, I'm now thinking that writing an ISAPI equivalent to mod_ruby may be a better bet (LGPL'ed of course). I've never written an ISAPI before but if I can incorporate FastCGI, Ionic Rewrite and all the other mucking about into a single DLL it's bound to make my installation routine easier. If any of you have any experience of writing ISAPI DLLs I would be grateful of any pointers. My first stage, I guess, is to download the code to mod_ruby and see what that is doing (although I will probably write my DLL in Delphi rather than your steenkin' C).

Secondly, it's fast becoming apparent that there are a lot of people interested in running Rails on IIS and there isn't that much information out there. I am currently doing this part-time, my day job is really Delphi and the Rails stuff came about because I found it interesting and we needed a web application throwing together very quickly. The issues noted above show that I don't always have time help people out with their problems (sorry Erwin), although I am happy to be asked - however, I reckon between us, we can figure it all out. A blog isn't really the best format for that though - so should I set up a forum to discuss the issues we come up against and any possible solutions? I'm happy to host it if you're happy to post there. Let me know what you think.