IronPython URLs

Professional IronPython is a new book on IronPython, published by Wrox and written by John Meuller  (who has apparently written 73 books). Create applications that are more responsive to user needs IronPython should be an important part of your developer's toolbox and this book will quickly get you up and running with this powerful language. John Paul Mueller clearly shows how IronPython can help you create better desktop or web-based applications in less time and with fewer errors. Throughout the pages, you'll find techniques for extending IronPython and making it a more robust language. In addition, you'll follow advanced steps such as building an IronPython extension that directly accesses the Win32 API. And you'll enhance your skill set as you introduce IronPython into other environments such as Linux® and Mac OS® X.       Professional IronPython is the third book on IronPython, with the first two being IronPython in Action and Pro IronPython...

March 9th (that's tomorrow at the time of typing) IronPython in Action is the Manning deal of the day. This is a one day offer with a special discount. You can get the discount by buying IronPython in Action from the Manning website and using the discount code dotd0310tw. It isn't only IronPython in Action that is on offer, you can also get Quick Python by Vern Ceder.

Another collection of IronPython and DLR related articles from around the web. A fine way to end 2009. SLog: Silverlight Logging A nascent project to Port Log(4|5)J from Java to C# with the goal of usefulness in Silverlight, especially for IronPython. A WPF Picture Viewer NotifyIcon to use from IronPython  Two Japanese blog entries, both by sasakima-nao. As with previous entries the code examples are very readable. The first is a simple WPF picture viewer (nice penguins) and the second shows how to create a NotifyIcon and ContextMenu in the taskbar (with Windows Forms classes). Python-Ruby (and a little bit of soap) This blog entry is in Russian, but I think there are enough code examples for it to be useful for those of us who don't speak Russian. As I've mentioned before the promise of the Dynamic Language Runtime is that dynamic languages can interoperate and share libraries. This is exactly what this blog entry shows: using the Ruby soap/wsdlDriver from Python. ...

More IronPython and DLR related projects, articles and news from around the web. Small PIL for IronPython  One of the disadvantages of developing with IronPython, particularly for using existing libraries and codebases, is that C extensions don't work. One possibility is to use Ironclad , a C extension compatibility layer by Resolver Systems. Another one is to find or create a compatible API using .NET libraries. An important C extension in the Python world, virtually ubiquitous where images are used and manipulated, is the Python Imaging Library . All sorts of other projects (Django and Reportlab for example) use PIL, causing problems for using them from IronPython. A Japanese blogger has * started * to solve this problem by creating an IronPython project called "small pil" implementing part of the PIL API for IronPython. Changes to Dialogue Script in December 2009  i-Dialogue is a "Customer Experience Management" application by Cubic Compass. It is relev...

Another collection of blog entries and articles related to IronPython and the Dynamic Language Runtime. Win a book on IronPython or F# Allan Juhl Petersen has a competition running until 29th September where you can win a book on IronPython (and a good book it is too ) or F#: I have created 7 questions, in different programming languages such as C#, F#, Ironpython, C++, Java and of course the well known and liked true or false . The questions are designed to give a number of points, where the maximum number of points given can be read in the text of the assignment. The rules are simple, the one with the highest score on points, will win. Points will be given for correctness and effort. An assignment might give 6 point, but if not entirely correct, it will be given some points for effort. The winner gets Office 2007 Student version and gets to choose between two books ? Foundations of F# or IronPython in Action - and the runner-up gets the one that the winner did not choose. Compa...

IronPython in Action is the first book on IronPython and is aimed at both .NET developers new to Python and Python developers new to .NET. Three more reviews have been posted, one by a core-Python developer (the release manager no less), one by a .NET developer and the third, well, hmm... Python bytes: IronPython in Action Benjamin Peterson is the Python release manager and a contributor to the PyPy project . You might say he knows a bit about Python. Here's an extract from the review: IronPython in Action seems to do a very job, overall, of catering both Python programmers tiptoeing into IronPython and .NET and C# developers finding the light of dynamic programming. I found the web programming part of the book, especially the part on Silverlight, most interesting, since embedding Python in the browser seems like a lot more fun than writing cross-browser JavaScript. Before reading this book, I had dismissed .NET as a non-cross-platform hunk of Javaish APIs. I see now, though, that...

It's good to have friends in high places, and two of them have reviewed IronPython in Action . Both Jonathan Hartley and Brett Cannon are experienced Python developers. Jonathan Hartley is a colleague of mine at Resolver Systems where we have been working full time with IronPython for the last few years. I finally managed to blackmail him into actually reading IronPython in Action. Despite this he seemed to genuinely enjoy it and has posted a glowing review. The first paragraphs of the review have some interesting things to say about the place of IronPython in the Python world, which is the section I've quoted below: Jonathan Hartley Reviews IronPython in Action Having spent some years working with .NET, and with a series of intriguing personal experiments in Python under my belt, I originally approached IronPython some years ago with a modicum of of trepidation. I feared that the weld between the two would be intrusively visible, forming distracting differences from regular...

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 the last couple of weeks a whole stack of people have posted reviews of IronPython in Action . Here's a brief summary of five of them: Jason Baker on IronPython in Action Jason Baker is a Python developer for Zeomega : " In summary, if you’re a developer wanting to work with Windows technologies using Python there’s no question: go and buy IronPython in Action. Right now. If you’re wanting to develop IronPython applications for various platforms or don’t want to tie yourself to just Microsoft technology… still go and buy IronPython in Action. There are still some holes that can be filled, but all in all, this is a pretty solid book ." Mike Hadlow on IronPython in Action Mike Hadlow is a well known .NET developer from the UK: " It’s a very well written and crafted book, with an easy to read conversational style. I find many programming books quite hard work, but this one was a pleasure. " Mark Bloodworth on IronPython in Action Mark Bloodworth is a Microsoft A...

As outlined in IronPython in Action Goes to College , Tony Andrew Meyer is teaching a programming course and using IronPython in Action as course material. Part of his preparation is deciding which IDE to use in the course - a choice that is not entirely straightforward for IronPython. Tony has done a long and thorough blog entry going through all the possibilities. The editors he looks at are: Notepad++, IronPython Studio, SharpDevelop 3.0, SharpDevelop 3.1b1, Wing IDE 101, Davy's IronPython Editor, Visual Studio under experimental hive and Komodo Edit. Choosing an IronPython editor for teaching The Northtec D520 “Programming” course is changing to IronPython (from Visual Basic) this year, so I have to figure out what editor/IDE the students should use. In some ways, Visual Studio would be ideal, since they need to get exposed to that during the course (and it’s an excellent IDE, with a really great form designer), but since there isn’t any real IronPython support in Visual Stu...

Ted Neward is a well known .NET developer. He has been reading IronPython in Action and posted a review of it. Interoperability Happens Ted Neward doesn't have unqualified praise for the book, but he seems to like it - even getting over his prejudice for 'the whitespace issue' (block structure by indentation in Python). Here are some things he liked about IronPython in Action: The focus is on both .NET and Python, and doesn't try to short-change either the "Python"-ness or the ".NET'-ness by trying to be a "Python book (that happens to run on .NET)" or a ".NET book (that happens to use Python for code samples)". The authors, I think, did a very good job of balancing the two, making this the book to get if you're in that area on the Venn diagram where "Python" overlaps with ".NET". Part 2, "Core development techniques", starts down the "feed you the Python Kool-Ade" pretty quickly, headin...

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python and its Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL). He is employed by google and not known for his love of the Windows platform. That aside I sent him a copy of IronPython in Action and he has reviewed it. As you can tell from the title of his blog entry it isn't a typical review, but he does say some very nice things about the book: IronPython in Action and the Decline of Windows Seeing a book like IronPython in Action, by Michael Foord and Christian Muirhead, is another milestone for IronPython. This is a solid work in every aspect, and something nobody using IronPython on .NET should be without. The book is chock full of useful information, presented along with a series of running examples, and covers almost every aspect of IronPython use imaginable. There are some introductory chapters -- some fluff about .NET and the CLR, an introduction to Python, and an introduction to with .NET objects from IronPython. The Python introduction has a slight ...

Thanks to the wonder of Twitter I've heard about two different college courses that will be using IronPython in Action as course material next semester. One is Sargeant Reynolds College in America, with a course taught by Kevin Hazzard , and the other is Northtec in New Zealand with a course taught by Tony Meyer . IronPython is an ideal language for learning programming, it has the great combination of an easy to learn general purpose programming language (Python) with a programming environment which is widely used in commercial development (the .NET framework). Not only these factors, but it is easy to teach good programming practise with Python; things like well structured code, testing, computer science theory including elements of functional programming and so on. I exchanged emails with Tony who explained why he is using IronPython in Action: The course is (unimaginatively) titled "Programming" (not my doing!). It's at NorthTec at the Whangarei campus (a cou...

IronPython 1.0, a complete implementation of Python for the .NET framework, was released in September 2006. The first IronPython 2.0 release (Alpha 1) came in April 2007. IronPython 2.0 was built on the new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) which was a framework for implementing dynamic languages in general, which had been abstracted out of the IronPython 1.0 release. Along with the new IronPython 2.0 project IronRuby was announced. IronRuby was an implementation of Ruby for .NET, led by John Lam who had previously been involved in the RubyCLR project. It has been a long road for IronRuby, with the latest release version 0.5. IronRuby 1.0 at OSCON 2009 Following their tradition of conference driven releases (panic-driven-development?) IronRuby 1.0 will be released at the coming OSCON 2009 conference: IronRuby is 1.0! Come and see how IronRuby is used in .NET programs, how well it performs, and how conformant it is. IronRuby is an Open Source implementation of the Ruby programming langu...

IronPython in Action may have been the first book (in English) on IronPython but it is no longer the only one. Pro IronPython, by Alan Harris for Apress , is now available. Pro IronPython by Alan Harris IronPython represents a unique direction for developers interested in working with dynamic languages within the .NET Framework. Whether you’re looking to develop applications from scratch or add functionality and maintainability to an existing application, IronPython opens many doors while providing a high–speed, high–performance language that integrates tightly with other .NET languages. Learn to create applications using the benefits of a dynamically typed language. Discover how to leverage the power of IronPython to improve existing applications. Explore interacting with other .NET languages by invoking the common language runtime. What you’ll learn Write IronPython console and forms applications. Integrate IronPython scripts into existing applications to increase their functionalit...

If you follow this blog, or the state of IronPython on Mono , you will know that the version of IronPython included in Mono (from the FePy project ) is quite out of date. This is because (for various reasons) Mono has been unable to compile IronPython 2.0 from source which has prevented a new FePy release. This causes a problem with running the IronPython in Action examples from Mono and I wrote a blog entry about how to work around this: IronPython in Action Examples on Mono The intention is that MultiDoc, along with as many examples from the book as possible, run on both Mono and the .NET framework; IronPython isn't just for Windows but can also be used on Linux and Mac OS X or anywhere that Mono will run. Some readers have reported that MultiDoc crashes on exit when run with Mono. The root cause of this is the old version of IronPython 2 that ships with Mono. ... This is reason enough to look at using a more recent version of IronPython 2. Even though IronPython can't be co...

Christian Glessner is head of development at Data One and a Sharepoint expert. Even before IronPython in Action came out he was experimenting with integrating IronPython with Sharepoint and he has now enthusiastically reviewed the book with this in mind: iLove Sharepoint: IronPython in Action IronPython In Action covers all you need to get started with IronPython for a .NET or Python developer. It is written coherently without needless ballast, well suited to the philosophy of the language itself. My favorite chapters are “ Silverlight: IronPython in the browser ”, “ Agile testing where dynamic typing shines ” and “ Embedding the IronPython engine ”. The book has inspired me to found the CodePlex project IronSharePoint (coming soon) showing how you can develop SharePoint apps with IronPython. I’m convinced that in the near future dynamic languages will get more attention again, just think of the “dynamic” keyword in C# 4.0. Absolutely worth keeping an eye on it!

In the last couple of weeks three new reviews of IronPython in Action have gone online, and by reviewers from three different continents. The first is from Tarn Barford who is an Australian .NET programmer with an interest in IronPython. He has blogged and presented about IronPython, and now he has reviewed IronPython in Action: The Australian: IronPython in Action IronPython in Action is a fantastic resource for anyone learning IronPython and for anyone wondering what this dynamic language IronPython is all about and whether they should learn it. It feels nicely balanced for both .NET users looking to learn about IronPython, and for Python users looking to learn about IronPython on .NET. I prefer software books that have plenty of discussion and can be read from start to finish otherwise I end up skipping through chapters I never go back too. I found this book well written and fun to read with interesting insight all the way through. There is enough about the python language and .NET...

The Coding Geekette is a Python and .NET developer who has spoken on IronPython at many developer conferences including PyCon . Her next adventure is teaching .NET developers Python in Cleveland: Python 101 for the .NET Developer What: "Python 101 for the .NET Developer" with Sarah Dutkiewicz, Cleveland C#/VB.NET SIG When: Tuesday, June 23, 6:30-8:30pm Where: Beacon Place Conference Center, Beacon Place Office Building, 6055 Rockside Woods Blvd, Lower Level, Independence, OH 44131 Python and .NET Regular Expressions at the Interactive Interpreter This blog entry (non-English) shows two interactive sessions using the System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex class; performing the same task from both IronPython (2.6 beta) and IronRuby (0.4). The interactive interpreter is a great environment for experimenting, and the sessions ably demonstrate this. Of course you could also achieve the same thing with the Python re module . This is true of many things in IronPython, file and path ...

In the last couple of weeks two Englishmen called Tim have posted reviews of IronPython in Action . Tim Anderson is a technical writer who specialises in writing about Microsoft technologies. As well as writing for the Guardian he blogs regularly and has just reviewed IronPython in Action: Book Review: IronPython in Action It is aimed at Python programmers who do not know .NET, and .NET programmers who do not know Python, rather than at existing IronPython developers. The authors run through the basics of Python and its .NET integration, so that by the end of Part 1 you could write a simple Windows Forms application. Part 2 is on core development techniques and covers duck typing, model-view-controller basics, handling XML, unit and functional testing, and metaprogramming – this is where you generate and execute code at runtime. It’s a well-written book and fulfils its purpose nicely. I like the way the book is honest about areas where IronPython is more verbose or awkward than C# or V...