I had a little trouble building these from source with MSVC so I thought I'd record the issues I faced both so that I can refer back to this post if I forget, and perhaps help others along the way ( Read more... )

Yet another "how to build" post mostly for my own reference, but you may find it useful.

Building the openssl lib for Ruby with Visual Studio is a bit of a pain. First, you'll need to install openssl itself (which you can build from source if you have Perl installed) or use their precompiled stuff. To build openssl itself from source, do this:

( Read more... )

There are some interesting subtleties between the "current user" on Windows, depending on whether you're talking about threads or processes. On Windows a thread can essentially run as a user different from the process it's created in. From MSDN ( Read more... )

Since Luis Lavena's mingw binary installer for Windows is more or less the defacto standard nowadays, I'm finally biting the bullet and installing the MinGW package for my Windows XP VM. I need it to ship Win32 binaries for a few remaining libraries that still use C extensions.

The library in question today is win32-open3, a library that appears ( Read more... )

We've added a few methods in win32-process to the Process module that were previously unimplemented. Specifically ( Read more... )

Building Ruby on Windows manually with VC++ is pretty straightforward. The downside is that two libraries in particular, OpenSSL and Zlib, have always been a PITA to build yourself. Since Rubygems needs Zlib, and Rails needs OpenSSL, this has always been problematic.

The zlib problem has been partially solved by Zliby, a pure Ruby implementation ( Read more... )

A couple of issues in the win32-eventlog library surfaced this week. First, we hit a 64 bit bug that relates to the way WoW64 deals with the system32 directory. You can read the gory details here if you're interested.

That issue was fixed in the 0.4.9 release.

The second issue, and one we haven't fixed yet, is that they've changed the event log ( Read more... )

A long standing bug with win32-service may finally be fixed soon. Well, worked around anyway. There was a thread issue that caused a stop event to basically deadlock the service. Oh, it stopped the service, but in a long and ugly way, and the stop event handler wasn't being called ( Read more... )

In the CVS repo for the Win32 Utils project you'll find a project called "windows-api". It's my attempt to cleanup and revamp the Win32API package. The first iteration didn't do much more than some basic code cleanup and add instance variables for various bits of information that were previously unreachable ( Read more... )

Tired of dealing with the fact that Ruby's ParseDate class doesn't handle long time zone names properly, I finally went in and edited my registry. For those who care, here's the base key ( Read more... )