A Whole Bunch of Stuff: Part I

By Michael Foord -
My backlog includes a lot of interesting snippets and blog entries that probably don't warrant a whole entry to themselves. There's a lot of good stuff in them, so I'm splitting them out into two separate entries.

A blog entry on using the IronPython 1 hosting API to call functions - including embedding it in ASP.NET pages.
This happened a while ago, but I missed it. Windows High Performance Computing Operating System is out (HPC Server 2008) - and it includes IronPython 'out of the box'!

"To tempt Unix users and coders in scientific programming languages, there is a built-in POSIX shell, support for IronPython, IronRuby and Fortran. Microsoft is also developing new tools such as the F# programming language and .NET Parallel Extensions."

"Much of the legacy code that developers may need to support is Linux-based, he says. Mendillo notes that support for Iron Ruby, Iron Python, Fortan and a built-in Posix-compliant shell should help many developers bridge to non-Windows environments."
I noted recently that the Intellipad tool, part of the Oslo framework, is scriptable with IronPython. Jon Flanders has a blog entry showing how to write new commands for IPad using IronPython.
One of the things I didn't mention in the recent entry on Silverlight 2 is that a version for Windows Mobile has been planned. The version of .NET targetting Windows Mobile (and the XBox 360) is the Compact Framework - and this doesn't include the 'Reflection.Emit' (code generation and introspection) APIs needed by the Dynamic Language Runtime. This unfortunately means that Silverlight 2 for Windows Mobile won't be able to run applications written in IronRuby or IronPython.
As the Dynamic Language Runtime forms the basis of both the IronPython and IronRuby projects (and currently slightly out of sync versions of the DLR are included in the downloads for both of these projects - making it hard to create projects that target both languages), and the DLR will be part of .NET 4, it really needs its own home. That home is a project page on the Codeplex Open Source project hosting site. This page is little more than a placeholder currently, but it notes:

"The Dynamic Language Runtime enables language developers to more easily create dynamic languages for the .NET platform. In addition to being a pluggable back-end for dynamic language compilers, the DLR provides language interop for dynamic operations on objects. The DLR has common hosting APIs for using dynamic languages as libraries or for scripting in your .NET applications. This project provides one stop shopping for the DLR components, our open source implementations of IronPython and IronRuby, documentation, and samples."

"This project is currently under construction, and we're targeting our first release of DLR v0.9 in November. We will be releasing simultaneously with IronPython v2.0. You can see all the DLR code in the IronPython Project's latest RC release and weekly source pushes. Our code is also available on IronRuby's site with daily source pushes."

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