The DotNetServicesRuby team, a partnership between Microsoft and Thoughtworks, announced the launch of Milestone 1 - Technology Preview of Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET Services, details of which can be found on the announcement on their blog. Microsoft® .NET Services is a key component of the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform that offers a set of Microsoft-hosted, developer-oriented services that provide key building blocks required by many cloud-based and cloud-aware applications.

According to the post,

The purpose of this project is to provide an interoperable open source Ruby Software Development Kit (SDK) - set of libraries, tools, prescriptive patterns & guidance & real world sample applications that will enhance productivity for developers.

As described in the web site

.NET Services for Ruby is an open source [under BSD license] software development kit (SDK) that helps Ruby programs communicate with Microsoft .NET Services using plain HTTP. Specifically the SDK includes set of REST libraries, tools, prescriptive patterns & guidance & sample applications that will enhance productivity for Ruby developers. The focus of this release is to demonstrate interoperable architecture, Service Bus and Web-Style (REST) Authentication.

The libraries use industry standards and web protocols such as REST, SOAP, WS-*. and includes three core components—Access Control, Service Bus, and Workflow service to build interoperable cloud-based applications. The team also provides a sample Billboard application that showcases the library.

Additional SDKs are available at the Azure Services Platform Resources page for accessing the services using the .net languages and Java. Be sure to check out the details of the Ruby library at the DotnetServicesRuby website and provide the team with feedback.