For non-Rails work, regular Ruby works fine on my Windows 7 machine.
But I'm about to start some Rails work that will use SQL Server as a database, and trying to get Rails set up has been a total pain so far. (I still can't get sqlite3 or SQL Server to work correctly with Rails yet.)
So I'm wondering: will using IronRuby (which I haven't used before) make the whole process of using Rails on Windows+SQL Server a lot easier? I'm not terribly interested in .NET integration or the latest Rails features, I just want something that runs on Windows and that can access SQL Server.
like everyone else said - IronRuby won't make your life easier. it will make it more difficult in this case, because it take a lot more work to get rails up and running on IronRuby and you will lose out on native extension support.
I'm a .NET developer by day, and I do Rails development on Windows at night. I have zero issues with the core of rails or SQLite (I don't use SQL Server, though). for a good tutorial on how to get Rails working, including how to get SQLite working, see this link:
http://accidentaltechnologist.com/ruby-on-rails/running-rails-3-on-windows/
the SQLite installation is simple, but not obvious.