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Showing posts from May, 2010

A Good Mix 36: Jim Hugunin, Selenium Two, Embedding IronPython & IronPython with Expression Blend

Another collection of IronPython and DLR related articles from recent weeks. Jim Hugunin: Modelling the World Jim Hugunin is a bit of a Python veteran. As well as being the creator of two implementations of Python (Jython and IronPython), he also started the Numpy project (back when it was called Numeric). Not long ago he was swallowed by Microsoft, who also took on the development of IronPython and turning it into the Dynamic Language Runtime. In this video interview Jim explains not only how he got involved in Python, but also what he has been up to recently. IronPython Tools for Visual Studio with Expression Blend One of the ways that .NET helps you separate your visual design from your application logic is through XAML; an XML based declarative language that can be used with both Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight. Naturally there are design tools that will generate XAML. Visual Studio is one of them, but the best one is Expression Blend. XAML has features

MonoDroid: IronPython on Android?

MonoTouch is a cross-compiler IDE and toolchain for the iPhone OS series. It allows you to write iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad applications with .NET languages like C# and take advantage of nice features of the .NET framework (actually Mono) like the extensive class libraries, proper garbage collection and so on. Because of the rules against interpreters and code generators MonoTouch didn't include the System.Reflection.Emit apis that are needed for Dynamic Language Runtime languages like IronPython and IronRuby. Despite this restriction  MonoTouch was a victim of the controversial Section 3.3.1 of the iPhone developer agreement that requires iPhone apps to be written in objective-C, C or C++. (Modern developers who prefer the reliability of garbage collection based languages need not apply...) Apple's main goal seems to be sticking two fingers up to Adobe and banning their Flash cross compiler, but other tools like MonoTouch are collateral damage. If there was ever any dou

adodbapi 2.3.0 (the django version) released

Vernon Cole has announced the release of a new version of adodbapi, a Windows database driver that works with both CPython and IronPython.   This version is all about django support.  There are two targets:     A) MS SQL database connections for mainstream django.     B) running django on IronPython    Thanks to Adam Vandenberg for the django modifications. adodbapi home page on sourceforge A Python DB-API 2.0 module that makes it easy to use Microsoft ADO for connecting with databases and other data sources using either CPython or IronPython. This version is highly refactored following the work of Adam Vandenberg, and also has all of the current user suggested patches. Both the Mercurial tree and the downloadable zip files are updated.  (There is no fancy installer, just copy the folder in your site-packages folder.) This has been tested using CPython 2.3, CPython 2.6, IronPython 2.6 (.NET 2) and IronPython 2.6(.NET 4), accessing .mdb, MS-SQL and MySQL databases.  There is a

SQLite, zlib and XNA

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Jeff Hardy has been at it again, and has just done releases of both IronPython.SQLite and IronPython.Zlib - ports of the Python zlib and pysqlite modules to IronPython. IronPython: SQLite and Zlib IronPython.Zlib  implements the zlib module for IronPython using ComponentAce’s zlib.net, which is a purely managed implementation of the zlib library. IronPython.Zlib is entirely managed code and works with both 32-bit and 64-bit IronPython. It passes all of the Python 2.6 zlib and gzip tests and most of the zipfile tests. IronPython.SQLite is a port of pysqlite to IronPython using C#-SQLite, which, similar to zlib.net, is a managed implementation of SQLite. Thus, IronPython.SQLite is also 100% managed code. It passes about 87% of the Python 2.6 sqlite3 tests; the remaining ones are mostly corner cases or rarely used functionality. Carl Trachte also emailed me about a Japanese blog post on using XNA with IronPython. XNA is the Microsoft game creation framework that runs on the XBox 360

IronPython Tools for Visual Studio

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Visual Studio is the Microsoft IDE for Windows and is virtually ubiquitous as a Windows development tool. Unfortunately Visual Studio has never had good support for languages like Python, which became more of a problem for Microsoft when they developed and released a distribution of Python themselves (IronPython). Whilst there have been many good IDEs  with IronPython support there has until now been lacking from Visual Studio - and adding support has been the highest voted Visual Studio feature request for some time. Adding good support for a dynamic language to an IDE is very different from supporting statically typed languages. The internals of Visual Studio rely on the static type information for the intellisense, designers, refactoring and so on. However, the IronPython team themselves have come to the rescue and built IronPython integration into Visual Studio 2010: IronPython Tools for Visual Studio We are happy to announce the first broadly available release of IronPyth

Updated Dynamic Languages in Silverlight Page

Silverlight is the Microsoft browser plugin that, amongst other things, allows you to run Python and Ruby in the browser with full access to the browser DOM. This is all through the magic of the Dynamic Language Runtime. With either Silverlight or Moonlight installed, the simplest DLR-based application can be contained in a single HTML file:     <script src="http://gestalt.ironruby.net/dlr-latest.js" type="text/javascript"> </script>     <script type="text/ruby"> window.alert "Ruby in the browser!" </script>     <script type="text/python"> window.Alert("Python works too!") </script> The introduction page on the silverlight.net site has now been updated. Dynamic Languages in Silverlight Writing Silverlight applications in Ruby, Python, and other DLR-based languages only requires a local web server, a text editor, and a browser which supports Silverlight on Windows or Mac OS ,