A Good Mix 18: Amazon S3, Professional IronPython, Silverlight Spy, Loading Data from CSV Files and Sharepoint

A collection of projects, articles and blog entries on IronPython from the last few weeks.

• Lit S3 Commander 1.0

Lits3 is "a library written in C# that provides comprehensive and straightforward access to Amazon S3 for .NET developers". The commander is a command line interface to LitS3, written in IronPython by Atif Aziz, and it just had a 1.0 release.

• Professional IronPython by John Paul Meuller

This is a book by John Wiley due out on 20th April 2010. I can't find any other references to it on the net other than this Amazon.co.uk page, but it's been up for a while.

• Paperback: 504 pages
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (20 April 2010)
• ISBN-10: 0470548592
• ISBN-13: 978-0470548592

I've not crossed paths with John Paul Meuller in the IronPython community, but it seems he's written quite a few technical books.

• Silverlight Spy with DLR Integration

Silverlight Spy is a tool for doing runtime inspection of Silverlight applications:

"Use the built-in browser to navigate to a web page. Silverlight Spy automatically detects the applications embedded in the page and provides various inspection view panes. Explore the XAP package, Isolated Storage, monitor performance, browse the UI visual and logical tree, examine objects, execute code in the DLR shell and more".

As the blurb says, it includes a DLR shell:

"Use the DLR shell to execute dynamic language code such as Ruby and Python right in the Silverlight application's AppDomain. The DLR shell is a very powerful tool that allows you to inspect and modify the application in ways that have not been seen before. The shell comes with a set of samples that should get you started."

Here's a screenshot of the DLR Shell in Action, using IronPython to inspect the live application.

• Loading Data from CSV Files

Resolver One uses the excellent LumenWorks Csv Reader library for its CSV file support. This library can also be used from user code and of course directly from IronPython. The reader class is fast and capable, but as with many open source libraries the documentation is somewhat lacking.

This article is part of the Resolver One documentation and covers how to use the Csv Reader from formulae and user code. It is now the best documentation on configuring and using the CsvReader class, from IronPython or any .NET language.

• Sharepoint: Make a subfolder hierarchy inherit from parent

IronPython is great for administering Sharepoint installs, and this snippet of code is one example of how you can use it:

I have been involved in a huge public folder migration project for my company. One particular folder I migrated had a hierarchy of 1500 subfolders. The migration tool was nice enough to migrate the permissions for me for each folder into sharepoint. Cool, right? Yes until my manager told me he just wanted to manage the parent folder in sharepoint and have the subfolders inherit everything. There is nothing in sharepoint out-of-the-box that lets you do this in one shot. Now there are probably many 3rd party sharepoint admin tools that will do this. But here is the poor man's way. Simple IronPython script.