This year at OSCON I had the pleasure of giving a talk entitled Upgrading to Rails 3. The talk served as a high level overview of the new features of Rails 3 that are both a boon for developers and something to watch out for when trying to upgrade your Rails 2.3 applications. I followed it up with a livecoding session in which I took a to-do application (built mostly by Intridea’s own Jeremy McAnally) from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3 in the space of just over 10 minutes.

The slides and video are available at the end of the post, and if you’re interested in really diving in-depth into the Rails 3 upgrade process, I highly recommend Jeremy McAnally’s Rails Upgrade Handbook as an indispensable tool. With the release of Rails 3 looming ever nearer, the timing couldn’t be better for you to dive in and learn what it will take to get your applications running on the next generation of Rails!

The above slides are fairly self-sufficient and give a high level overview of some of the changes Rails 3 brings and some of the tools and tricks to look for while upgrading. Below you’ll find the screencast I recorded livecoding (apologies for the “shouting” tone of voice, conference-voice doesn’t translate perfectly to screencast-voice) a transition from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3 on stage during the last 15 minutes of my talk.