Two quick notes today.
John Lam is working on a bridge between .Net 2.0 and Ruby. It will only work on .Net 2.0 for the moment as it is based on a feature not available in the previous versions of the framework (DynamicMethods). I’ll keep an eye on his releases — I’d love to write UI code with .Net and designer support, while using Ruby for the DSL / logic / database interaction in the background.
Bruce Tate gives an overview of the Ruby ActiveRecord ORM framework (the Ruby implementation of the ActiveRecord design pattern), and covers the migration part of ActiveRecord — the part which allows to describe how to handle evolutions of your database schema.
Update (2025): John Lam went on to work on IronRuby at Microsoft. The idea of bridging .Net and Ruby eventually materialized through IronRuby and RubyCLR, and I spent years working at that intersection. ActiveRecord, meanwhile, became one of the most influential ORMs in the industry.