A Good Mix 24: Commerce Server 2009, SharpDevelop 3.1, NWSGI, PyCon India and more...

Another collection of blog entries and articles related to IronPython and the Dynamic Language Runtime.
A blog entry from Charles Medcoff with a nice example of writing product queries for Commerce Server 2009 (the Microsoft e-commerce platform) with IronPython, including the necessary app.config magic to get it to work.
SharpDevelop is a .NET IDE for Windows with excellent support for IronPython in its latest version. This release is the final version of 3.1, which includes the new IronPython support (including forms designer and debugger):
Seven months after the 3.0 release comes version 3.1 – the last feature release of the 3.x series. The following high-profile features were added to SharpDevelop:
  • IronPython Windows Forms Designer
  • Debugging Support for IronPython Applications
  • Profiler for Managed Applications
The Future: 3.1.x and 4.0
SharpDevelop 3.1 is a long-term stable release branch as we are switching to .NET Framework 4.0 with SharpDevelop 4.0 “Mirador”. When new third party releases like NUnit (that target .NET Framework 3.5) are released, we will provide point releases of SharpDevelop 3.1 that are tested against those third-party versions. General bug fixes will be included.

SharpDevelop 4.0 is currently in its Alpha stages – we won’t be releasing a Beta before .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 2 is available. Due to larger infrastructure changes, there are still quite a few areas of SharpDevelop 4.0 that don’t work at all.

A few things you will see in SharpDevelop 4.0: a rehostable text editor (dubbed AvalonEdit) written entirely in WPF, an Entity Data Model designer, more debugger goodness, WPF designer & XAML code completion, and more.

A new release of NWSGI by Jeff Hardy. NWSGI is a .NET implementation of the Python WSGI specification for IronPython; implemented as an ASP.NET HttpHandler for use with IIS 6 and 7. The goal is to allow you to serve WSGI web applications with IronPython and the IIS server. Notes on this release:
To coincide with IronPython 2.6 RC1, NWSGI 2.0 RC1 is now available. This release is identical to Beta 2, except for the version of IronPython is uses.
We covered the changes in NWSGI 2 previously.
Python conferences have exploded this year with new conferences all over the world. One of the new ones was PyCon India and it is good hear that IronPython featured there:
Second day, Mr. Keerthi Shankar Sekar gave a talk on ‘Python and .NET’, the talk was an introduction to IronPython – a Python interpreter for the Microsoft .NET platform. Mr Keethi gave a demo on setting up IronPython for application development and explained some of the major behind-the-scene differences between CPython and IronPython.
 Microsoft Agent is an API for manipulating odd animated cartoon characters in Windows. Unfortunately (I guess) Agent won't be developed any more. From the Agent homepage:
Microsoft has decided to discontinue development of Microsoft Agent technologies. Beginning with Windows® 7, Microsoft Agent will not be included or supported in future versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. We encourage Microsoft Agent application developers and redistributors to evaluate their activities in light of this decision.
It is still fun to play with though, and this blog entry and snippet of IronPython shows you how to get an animated dog flying across your screen:
I was busy with some code and was trying to concentrate when I heard a noise from my computer that sounded like someone or something was scratching. My first impulse was to kill all the browser windows thinking that it must be some amateur website that had some flash ad running. Yet, 2-3 minutes later, something scratched yet again. And, there was this distinct feeling that this sound was quite familiar (no pun intended!)
At this point, I killed everything except my explorer windows. And, yet I could hear the scratching sound. And, that’s when it clicked. Mr. Rover – the ever friendly search assistant had completed the “fetch” and was waiting for me to do something with him again!
How can you not like the dog! Seeing Mr. Rover again, I was reminded of an IronPython talk that Mahesh Prakriya (from the DLR team) had conducted at MS IDC. One of his demos used to show how easy it was to invoke Merlin and make Merlin do some wizardry using IronPython.
Interest piqued, moments later, I had the latest build of IronPython downloaded and was ready to make Rover appear.

Comments

  1. Just wanted to thank-you for your efforts here. These summaries have pointed me to a lot of IronPython content I would have otherwise missed.

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