Silverlight 2 and Dynamic Languages
Well my backlog is logged so far back that I haven't even blogged about the final release of Silverlight 2.
In case you've been living under a rock for the last year, Silverlight 2 is a browser plugin from Microsoft. It is similar to Flash (aimed at games, media streaming and rich internet applications) and is cross-platform (Mac OS X and Windows - the officially blessed Linux port Moonlight by the Mono guys is making good progress though) and cross browser (IE 7+, Safari & Firefox 2+). Unlike Flash it can be programmed with a choice of languages, and through the Dynamic Language Runtime it can be programmed in Python, Ruby and Javascript.
Silverlight 2 final is now out, and according to Scott Guthrie has now been installed on over 100 million consumer computers.
Naturally Jimmy Schementi, who maintains the Dynamic Language Support for Silverlight, released an updated version of the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK (sucky name - more on this in a bit):
In preparation for my talk at the PyWorks conference I updated my IronPython Web IDE (tool for experimenting with the Silverlight APIs from Python in the browser) and Try Python (interactive Python interpreter in the browser) for Silverlight 2:
Of course if you're interested in building internet applications with Silverlight then you will want the extended controls that come as part of the Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight 2 (this works with Visual Studio Professional or the free Visual Web Developer Express). The assemblies that come with the tools include the data grid, extra controls like the date picker and various other useful APIs.
Even better is the Silverlight Toolkit. This is by Microsoft, but Open Source (living on Codeplex and with Unit Tests). As it is a separate project it can have a separate release cycle, including experimental components and being updated more frequently than Silverlight itself.
The toolkit includes charting components plus new controls covering styling, layout, and user input.
Since these releases Jimmy Schementi has been far from idle. His latest blog entries track what he has been up to:
Though, for certain scenarios, running scripts in a VB/C# application would be useful. For example, a shopping application that has a bunch of business rules, like "when someone has three items in their cart that all have to do with cooking, give them 10% off." These type of rules can change all the time, and traditionally you'd either store the rules in a database and implement a engine to understand the rules, or hand-code them yourself and have to redeploy the system every time you want to change them. Or, you could save yourself the hassle and store the rules as Python or Ruby code, and then host the DLR in your application to run the code. Want to update the rules? Just update the code, nothing more.
Embedding an IronRuby REPL (interactive interpreter) in a Silverlight application.
This is the good one! Jimmy posted this email to the IronRuby and IronPython mailing lists:
First and foremost, I want to thank anyone who has used the bits on http://codeplex.com/sdlsdk, and accepting my bullshit version of open-source. While getting monthly binaries/sources is nice, it should be about working on the project together ... not just me throwing stuff over the wall to you. That's changing, now ...
Oh, and remember me complaining about the crappy "sdlsdk" name ... well, I'm trying to get rid of that acronym ...
http://github.com/jschementi/agdlr
Above the public repository for the DLR integration in Silverlight. The following post explains what's in there, what's not, what's git, and how to contribute: http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2008/11/agdlr-silverlight-dlr-open-source.html
My first order of collaboration is this simple new feature, "console=true": http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2008/11/repls-in-silverlight.html. If you like this, please feel free to look at what's been done, and if you want to fix something that doesn't yet work correctly, I won't stop you.
Also, as I mentioned in a previous mail, I want to make the filesystem->XAP/isolatedstorage metaphor stronger, so feel free to experiment with that as well. Over the next week I'll get some website-presence/wiki/etc, and we can run this project up and running. There are still some hurdles I need to clear with getting contributed code back into our internal codebase, and shipping on Codeplex, but there are no problems with keeping things on GitHub for now.
Let me know if there are any question. I know I've been a bit silent on the Silverlight front, but take this as me making it up to you.
The resulting discussion also revealed where the Silverlight development tool Chiron got its name from:
Yep, Ag is Silver … made pretty obvious by my little logo for it.
As far as Chiron. It's a planetoid between Saturn and Uranus. The port that Chiron.exe runs on by default, 2060, is Chiron's "object" number. It was derived from the Cassini ASP.NET Web server that Dmitry Robsman wrote. Cassini was a probe mission to explore the moons of Saturn, and Chiron was initially thought to be a moon of Saturn.
Plus this from Michael Letterle:
More importantly, it's also the name of one of Jonathan Coulton's songs: "Chiron Beta Prime".
Because of this I knew how to pronounce the name :)
In case you've been living under a rock for the last year, Silverlight 2 is a browser plugin from Microsoft. It is similar to Flash (aimed at games, media streaming and rich internet applications) and is cross-platform (Mac OS X and Windows - the officially blessed Linux port Moonlight by the Mono guys is making good progress though) and cross browser (IE 7+, Safari & Firefox 2+). Unlike Flash it can be programmed with a choice of languages, and through the Dynamic Language Runtime it can be programmed in Python, Ruby and Javascript.
Silverlight 2 final is now out, and according to Scott Guthrie has now been installed on over 100 million consumer computers.
Naturally Jimmy Schementi, who maintains the Dynamic Language Support for Silverlight, released an updated version of the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK (sucky name - more on this in a bit):
In preparation for my talk at the PyWorks conference I updated my IronPython Web IDE (tool for experimenting with the Silverlight APIs from Python in the browser) and Try Python (interactive Python interpreter in the browser) for Silverlight 2:
Of course if you're interested in building internet applications with Silverlight then you will want the extended controls that come as part of the Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight 2 (this works with Visual Studio Professional or the free Visual Web Developer Express). The assemblies that come with the tools include the data grid, extra controls like the date picker and various other useful APIs.
Even better is the Silverlight Toolkit. This is by Microsoft, but Open Source (living on Codeplex and with Unit Tests). As it is a separate project it can have a separate release cycle, including experimental components and being updated more frequently than Silverlight itself.
The toolkit includes charting components plus new controls covering styling, layout, and user input.
Since these releases Jimmy Schementi has been far from idle. His latest blog entries track what he has been up to:
Though, for certain scenarios, running scripts in a VB/C# application would be useful. For example, a shopping application that has a bunch of business rules, like "when someone has three items in their cart that all have to do with cooking, give them 10% off." These type of rules can change all the time, and traditionally you'd either store the rules in a database and implement a engine to understand the rules, or hand-code them yourself and have to redeploy the system every time you want to change them. Or, you could save yourself the hassle and store the rules as Python or Ruby code, and then host the DLR in your application to run the code. Want to update the rules? Just update the code, nothing more.
Embedding an IronRuby REPL (interactive interpreter) in a Silverlight application.
This is the good one! Jimmy posted this email to the IronRuby and IronPython mailing lists:
First and foremost, I want to thank anyone who has used the bits on http://codeplex.com/sdlsdk, and accepting my bullshit version of open-source. While getting monthly binaries/sources is nice, it should be about working on the project together ... not just me throwing stuff over the wall to you. That's changing, now ...
Oh, and remember me complaining about the crappy "sdlsdk" name ... well, I'm trying to get rid of that acronym ...
http://github.com/jschementi/agdlr
Above the public repository for the DLR integration in Silverlight. The following post explains what's in there, what's not, what's git, and how to contribute: http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2008/11/agdlr-silverlight-dlr-open-source.html
My first order of collaboration is this simple new feature, "console=true": http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2008/11/repls-in-silverlight.html. If you like this, please feel free to look at what's been done, and if you want to fix something that doesn't yet work correctly, I won't stop you.
Also, as I mentioned in a previous mail, I want to make the filesystem->XAP/isolatedstorage metaphor stronger, so feel free to experiment with that as well. Over the next week I'll get some website-presence/wiki/etc, and we can run this project up and running. There are still some hurdles I need to clear with getting contributed code back into our internal codebase, and shipping on Codeplex, but there are no problems with keeping things on GitHub for now.
Let me know if there are any question. I know I've been a bit silent on the Silverlight front, but take this as me making it up to you.
The resulting discussion also revealed where the Silverlight development tool Chiron got its name from:
Yep, Ag is Silver … made pretty obvious by my little logo for it.
As far as Chiron. It's a planetoid between Saturn and Uranus. The port that Chiron.exe runs on by default, 2060, is Chiron's "object" number. It was derived from the Cassini ASP.NET Web server that Dmitry Robsman wrote. Cassini was a probe mission to explore the moons of Saturn, and Chiron was initially thought to be a moon of Saturn.
Plus this from Michael Letterle:
More importantly, it's also the name of one of Jonathan Coulton's songs: "Chiron Beta Prime".
Because of this I knew how to pronounce the name :)
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