Using IronPython with Wing and Netbeans IDEs

By Michael Foord -
Any good Python IDE will work well as an IronPython IDE, but some specific integration helps. One very good option is SharpDevelop, which has recently gained some very sophisticated IronPython support.

My favourite Python IDE is Wing, particularly for its autocomplete (intellisense) for Python and how easy it is to extend with new tools through its scripting API. Unfortunately Wing doesn't know about .NET types and so doesn't provide autocomplete when using them through IronPython. It does have a mechanism for teaching it about new libraries (generating interface files) which I modified to work with .NET libraries.
This article has the PI (Python Interface) script for downloads with instructions on how to generate PI files for .NET assemblies / namespaces plus how to make them available for Wing. It also has an example extension script for Wing which launches the current file with the IronPython interpreter (with instructions on how to make it available to Wing and bind it to a key combination).
I'm not the only one who has been experimenting with using IronPython with Python editors. Steve Gilham has been using Netbeans (the Java IDE by Sun which recently gained Python support) with IronPython:
With the arrival of the IronPython 2.6 beta 1, with ctypes support, the IronPython 1.x only support in IronPython Studio really takes the IDE from a bit dated to seriously obsolescent.

Now, I had tried to get IronPython 2.0 to talk with NetBeans, but hadn't immediately achieved success, so, with less motivation, had put that to one side. Perhaps for similar reasons, a recipe for this wasn't out on Google already -- but now I really needed to crack the problem, I wasn't going to let that earlier abject failure put me off...

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