PythonSilverScripting: Silverlight apps in the browser with Python

By Michael Foord -
Tarn Barford is an Australian blogger and programmer who uses IronPython. He's created a Google App Engine site for experimenting with IronPython in the browser (through Silverlight).
PythonSilverScripting lowers the barriers to building Silverlight applications so anyone from high school kids to seasoned programmers can have fun writing Silverlight applications in Python from within a browser!

Below is a simple script that creates a Silverlight application, sets the background blue and adds a TextBlock element with the text "Hello World".
He's also blogged about the new site, including his future plans for it:
PythonSilverScripting is based on crazy idea I have that it should be possible to make Silverlight applications in Python on the web. No tools, no SDKs.. just a browser (and obviously the Silverlight browser plug-in).
I've played around a bit with Silverlight and Dynamic Languages here and there and thought it was probably possible. When I got a chance I looked into it and found I was able to build working XAPs by zipping up plain text IronPython code, the IronPython DLR assemblies, an xml application manifest file and all the additional resources such XAML, images and more source.
All I needed was a web server that could zip files. Google App Engine with Python is good fun and I was able to get this working prototype together in an evening. I'd like to build the features to support building bigger projects (more source files, XAML documents, images and assemblies). On the other hand I'd also like to build features to share, discuss and rate scripts. We'll see how it goes.

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