I wasn't working with Alan when he wrote the original Tripod prototype. He hired me and Gary Kratkin, Mark Merker, and Frank Raab to rewrite the whole thing in a more maintainable and extensible way.

Alan was a good coder before he decided to concentrate on UX design, but like many prototypes where a number of different ideas have been explored, the code got a bit messy and he felt a fresh start was called for.

There's more of the story here:

http://www.cooper.com/alan/father_of_vb.html

I don't know of any other Microsoft projects that used the Ruby code or ideas, just Visual Basic.