Giles Thomas and Resolver One at Lang.NET Day 2

Giles Thomas demoed and explained Resolver One as part of the second day of the Lang.NET 2008 Symposium. Seo Sanghyeon talked about retargeting the DLR for fun and profit (presumably as part of his work for Mozilla on IronMonkey).

• Ted Newards Summary of the Day Two Proceedings
• The Paedantic Programmer Also Reports (but spends more time trying to package the DLR as a .deb)
• eWeek Reports on Resolver One - the spreadsheet that empowers users!
• DotNetLanguages Summarises Todays Speakers

Global System Builder

Global System Builder (GSB) is a light-weight Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed to provide software developers with the capability to dynamically program software in real-time from anywhere to anywhere in the world over the internet using a web browser.

• Global System Builder

This seems to be the fruition of a Web Based IDE for Distributed Programming in IronPython, last blogged about in June 2007.

This is an open source project (codeplex home page), and the web IDE includes an interactive IronPython interpreter and live object browser!

IronPython 2.0 Alpha 8 Release

IronPython 2.0 Alpha 8 has been released.

• IronPython 2.0 Alpha 8 Release Notes
• Download IronPython 2.0 Alpha 8
  

As well as closing about forty issues, the release includes the following notes:

We have just released IronPython 2.0 Alpha 8. Aside from the usual bugs fixes this release includes a fairly major change. This is the first release of IronPython where the Visual Studio solution file, IronPython.sln, is in Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008) format. This file is in fact incompatible with Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005) and the msbuild executable distributed with the .NET 2.0 SDK. If you currently build IronPython from VS2005 or the .NET 2.0 SDK this change will affect you and you have at least a couple of available options:

1. Upgrade to .NET 3.5 or VS2008. It’s important to point out that internally we pass the “/toolsversion:2.0” flag to msbuild when building from a command prompt. This isn’t mandatory though and the reason we use it is to ensure IronPython continues to run under .NET 2.0.
2. Continue to build IronPython under VS2005 or the .NET 2.0 SDK using IronPython2005.sln. IronPython2005.sln is the VS2005 version of IronPython.sln and exists alongside IronPython.sln in the source distribution zip file. We do not recommend this however as IronPython2005.sln is deprecated and we don’t plan on updating it

Another notable change is that all built-in Exception classes are now new-style classes. This improves our CPython 2.5 compatibility and we’re now able to run quite a few more CPython 2.5 tests successfully. On that note, a lot of effort has gone into making IronPython pass more of CPython’s 2.5 tests.

Quiz: Can you count how many combinations...

Mike Stall moves on from calculating army sizes with IronPython, and uses it to answer quiz puzzles...

• Quiz: Can you count how many combinations...
  

Lang.NET Symposium - Reports from Day 1

The Microsoft compiler conference, the 'Lang.NET Symposium' is in full swing. Yesterday Jim Hugunin wowed the crowds with his talk about IronPython whilst Martin Maly astonished with the DLR. Today Resolver's one Giles Thomas will be wowing them even more with Resolver One.

• Lang.NET 2008 Day 1 Thoughts - Charles Nutter, a JRuby core developer employed by Sun, reflects on day 1 and particularly the DLR.
• Highlights of the Lang.NET Symposium, Day 1 - A blog entry from Ted Neward describing all the presentations from yesterday.
  
• Lang.NET Symposium - A very brief report from Laurance A. Lee.
• From Lang.NET 2008 - Another report from an attendee impressed with the DLR, who is recording his notes on a wiki page.
  

IronPython 1.1.1 Released

IronPython 1.1.1 RC was recently released. After a couple of weeks with no reported problems, 1.1.1 this has become a full 1.1.1 release.

• IronPython - Release 1.1.1

This release fixes more than twenty bugs reported against IronPython 1.1.

Web Seminar: Silverlight and ASP.NET in IronPython & IronRuby

Dr. Dobbs is hosting a Net seminar on dynamic languages in Silverlight and ASP.NET. The 60 minutes session (on Tuesday February 19th) is being run by Jimmy Schementi, a Microsoft program manager.

• Silverlight and ASP.NET in IronPython & IronRuby
  

Help Wanted: IronPython PM

John Lam posts a job advert (Microsoft) for a program manager for IronPython. John compares the job to being a movie producer (hey it sounds great), and it is both a technical and evangelist role:

• Help Wanted: IronPython PM
  

Dynamic Lookup in C#

.NET languages are inexorably being influenced by dynamic languages like Python. Visual Basic Ten will include dynamic features, using the Dynamic Language Runtime. C# 3.0 has gained new features, like type inferencing and anonymous types, that bring some (but only some) of the benefits of dynamic languages to C#. This 'Future Focus' article starts to look at how the DLR, the interoperation of C# and dynamic languages, and directly dynamic behaviour will be further integrated into C# and Visual Studio in the future:

• Future Focus I: Dynamic Lookup
  

CLR Inside Out - Dynamic Languages and Silverlight

Jimmy Schementi is another member of the DLR / IronPython team with a blog:

• Jimmy | Thinking

He has just written an article for the CLR Inside Out online magazine:

• CLR Inside Out - Dynamic Languages and Silverlight

The article focuses on the DLR Console, a Python interactive interpreter that runs in Silverlight and allows you to mix working with XAML and other dynamic languages in the interpreter.

Building a DLR Language - Dynamic Behaviours 3

Martin Maly continues his exploration of the Dynamic Language Runtime internals:

• Building a DLR Language: Dynamic Behaviours 3
  

ASP.NET - IronPython

ArtyProg posts an entry showing example code for ASP.NET used with the free Visual Web Developer Express Edition 2008.

• ASP.NET - IronPython

PyPy Goes .NET

At the recent PyPy Sprint they worked on the integration of 'pypy-cli' with the .NET framework. They are implementing a clr module that provides compatibility with the way IronPython (and also Python.NET) do things. You can now add references to assemblies and import (and use) .NET classes.

• PyPy.NET Goes Windows Forms

Automatic handling of delegates isn't implemented, so you can't yet use events. Like much of PyPy, it is very exciting and nearly useful...

Martin Maly's New Blog on the Dynamic Language Runtime

Martin Maly, one of the IronPython core developers, has started a new blog. His first six entries all focus on the Dynamic Language Runtime, and go into the details of how it works and how to implement your own DLR language:

• Dynamic Language Runtime
• Building a DLR Langauge - Toyscript
• Building a DLR Language - Trees
• Building a DLR Language - Trees 2
• Dynamic Behaviours
• Dynamic Behaviours 2
  

More IronPython Posts

There have been a few more IronPython related posts recently:

• Battle Simulation Part 3: Size vs Smarts - Mike Stall does it again
• Simple DLR Language - A simple calculator language implemented with the Dynamic Language Runtime
• IronPython in Action, ConfigObj and doctests - News on the latest and coming chapters of "IronPython in Action"
• Changing the Default Browser with IronPython - Monkeying with the registry to change the default browser from IronPython
• Chasing Memory Leaks in Python Applications - How a problem in the IronPython implementation caused a hard to trace memory leak in Resolver One
• Anti-Pattern: Static Subject to Observer Mapping - Kamil's explanation of the anti-pattern that caused the memory leak

C Extensions for IronPython

A while ago Resolver Systems announced an open source project to get Python C-extensions working with IronPython. The project has been quiet for a while, but now that that the Resolver One 1.0 release is out of the way we can devote more time to it.

Fortunately one of our developers (William Reade) went to India over Christmas and spent some time hacking on the beach. He made good progress and has got 'zlib.pyd' loaded from IronPython and can call into it. He has just posted code and an explanation.

• The C Extensions for IronPython Mailing List and Group Page (with code download)
• My Blog Entry on Working on Jumpy with William
• William's Explanation of Jumpy and its Limitations

There is still an enormous amount of work, but not only does the basic approach work - we have the framework of an implementation.

Resolver 1.0 Released

After two years, two months and two days - we have finally released Resolver One 1.0. Resolver One is a spreadsheet application, fully programmable in IronPython, and is free for non-commercial uses.

• Download Resolver One
• The Announcement
• The Press Release
• 5 Reasons to Use Resolver by Andrzej Krzywda
• Resolver Hacks: How to get the best from Resolver One

Resolver One is the largest IronPython application to date, with around of 140 000 lines of IronPython code in production and the test suite.

IronPython 1.1.1 RC Released and DLR Hosting Spec

After a long hiatus there is a new release of IronPython 1.1: a release candidate of 1.1.1. If no problems are found this will shortly become 1.1.1.

The 1.1.1 release is a bugfix release, fixing around 20 bugs (most of which were already fixed in IronPython 2.0).

• IronPython 1.1.1 RC Download Page
• IronPython 1.1.1 RC Release Notes
  

This is great news as IronPython 2.0 (the Dynamic Language Runtime based version) is still in alpha and a final release isn't expected until the end of the year. A lot of people (including Resolver Systems) are still using IronPython 1.1.

The hosting API for the DLR is still changing as it is adapted to better support multiple languages (especially IronRuby). The aim is to ship DLR 1.0 at the same time as IronPython 2.0 final (but that may not work out).

The goals for IronPython generally include CPython 2.5 compatibility and fully running on top of the DLR. There have already been numerous improvements from IronPython 1.1 -> 2.0 and there should be a bunch more random improvements (e.g. bug fixes, performance, etc…).

An updated DLR API hosting spec document was recently made available:

• DLR Hosting API Spec
• Word Document
• PDF Document

Not all of the functionality in the spec is avilable in the current release of the DLR (part of IronPython 2.0 Alpha 7).

The current status is that ScriptEngine, ScriptScope, ObjectOperations, and ScriptSource (but still named SourceUnit) are fully implemented – although there are certainly some bugs still lurking.

Current planning going forward is to work on replacing ScriptEnvironment w/ ScriptRuntime, switching to use MBRO objects instead of the interfaces used today (completing the remoting story), and other small tweaks. In February the team aim to be looking at finishing up the support for multiple engines in the same app domain, defining and implementing the full set of configuration/options, and general fit-and-finish work.

Battle Simulations with IronPython (Part 2)

Mike Stall continues his exploration of modeling RTS battles with IronPython. More code and graphs!

• Battle Simulations with IronPython (Part 2)
  

The Python Challenge - from Powershell!

Mark (The Powershell Guy), has been having fun with The Python Challenge. Several of the levels can be done straight from Powershell, but the latest one he has reached requires loading Python pickles. To solve this he uses the IronPython assemblies and the Python standard library, from Powershell of course:

• POSH Challenge Part 3 (Using IronPython)
  
• POSH Challenge Part 2 (Level 1-4)
  
• POSH Challenge Part 1

In one post he mentions the Microsoft Winter Scripting Games, which are Feb 15th to March 3rd. Hopefully there will be some contenders using IronPython.

UI Automation on the FePy Blog

Jim Hugunin recently posted an example of using the .NET 3.0 UI Automation API from IronPython. This library hasn't yet been implemented for Mono, so Seon Sanghyeon
has written two blog entries on using an equivalent, "Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface", with IronPython:

• Using AT-SPI from IronPython (1)
• Using AT-SPI from IronPython (2)

Python vs C# 3.0: Tuples vs. Anonymous Types (Redux)

Dare Obasanjo looks at idomatic language use, in both Python and the new features of C# 3:

• Python vs C# 3.0: Tuples vs. Anonymous Types (Redux)

Reinforce It 1.1 Launched!

Martin Schray has just released Reinforce It v1.1. Written in a combination of C# and IronPython:

• Reinforce It v1.1 Launched!

What is Reinforce It!? Its an application that sits in the system tray and flashes a reminder (via a toast window similar to Outlooks). The intervals between the reminders and the reminder message are configurable.

All Possible Font Styles

We've nearly completed a new feature in Resolver, supporting all the different font styles offered by the .NET font dialog.

At the moment the Text Formatting dialog - which uses the standard .NET font dialog - allows you to select bold, italic, underline, and strike-through: but Resolver only supported bold.

In implementing this Kamil needed access to all the possible font style combinations. Here is how he did it (and why):

• All Possible Font Styles
  

IronPython on eee PC and OLPC

I've just received my Asus eee PC (8GB/1GB). It's very nice, unbelievably cute. I would have bought an OLPC of course, but they won't ship to the UK...

Anyway, I have no reports on IronPython running on either of these devices. There are reports of Mono running on both though, and as Mono comes with IronPython it should be straightforward:

• Mono on the OLPC
• Mono on the eee PC

Those who don't believe that it is possible to create good looking desktop applications with Mono and its Windows Forms implementation need to check out Plastic SCM:

• Plastic SCM 2.0 Preview

(Miguel has screenshots on the Mac and Linux.)

Oh, one final thing. Second Life offers a fantastic three dimensional virtual reality to explore. What is the obvious geek thing to do then? Build a text based interface for it of course! If this sparks your interest, then you may want to checkout 'SLTalker' and help write it in IronPython:

• Call for IronPython Coders to Help with SLTalker
  

Get values from Wii Remote (through IronPython and WiimoteLib.dll)

This is an English translation of the Japanese blog entry I linked to last week on using the managed Wii remote interface from IronPython:

• Get values from Wii Remote (through IronPython and WiimoteLib.dll)
  

Age of Empires Battle simulation with IronPython

Mike Stall has been using IronPython to simulate Age of Empires archer battles. Discussion, code and charts!

• RTS Battle simulation with IronPython
  

Does C# 3.0 Beat Dynamic Languages at their Own Game?

Dare Obasanjo continues his exploration of IronPython by exploring it to C# 3:

• Does C# 3.0 Beat Dynamic Languages at their Own Game?

C# 3 has several new features, that even if not directly inspired by Python, will seem very familiar to Python programmers...

Dare concludes:

I love the REPL, I love the flexibility that comes from having natural support tuples in the language and I love the more compact syntax. I guess I’ll be doing a lot more coding in Python in 2008.