Getting Started with IronPython and Embedding IronPython

By Michael Foord -
Charlie Calvert is Community Program Manager for the C# group at Microsoft. He has posted a couple of blog entries on using IronPython. The first shows you how to get started with IronPython on Windows, including setting up your path to easily execute Python scripts with ipy.exe. The second entry shows how to execute a Python file from C# when embedding the IronPython engine.
I recently spent some time getting IronPython up and running on my system; I will review what I learned in this post.

Hosted inside an interpreter, Python belongs to the same family of scripting tools as VBScript, JavaScript, Perl and Ruby. You can fairly compare Python to a general purpose language such as C#. Developers praise this loosely typed, dynamic language for its ease of use and rapid development capabilities. IronPython is Microsoft’s free version of the open source Python language.

IronPython can be hosted inside a C# program as a scripting language. Nonetheless, Python is a powerful standalone language frequently used as the glue in web based applications. Before I came to work for Microsoft I enjoyed using it as part of my daily toolkit.

In this post I explore the simple steps needed to run IronPython as a standalone tool from the command prompt. In other posts I will show how to call Python from inside a C# application.
IronPython is a scripting language hosted on the .NET platform. This posts shows how you can use the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and the new C# 4.0 dynamic keyword to call an IronPython script from a C# program.

Before going any further, it might be helpful to take a moment to explore the architecture that makes this technology possible. The key building block is the DLR, which sits on top of the .NET 4.0 CLR and provides the tooling for adding dynamic programs such as Python to the family of .NET languages. C# 4.0 adds the dynamic keyword and some related technologies to integrate support for dynamic binding into the language. The end result is that developers can arbitrary Python scripts directly from C# or other .NET language

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