IronPython Studio - It's Alive

After much fussing, I was able to get the December 2007 CTP of IronPython Studio running on my machine, though, in fairness, I required a virtual machine to do it. After posting to the IPS site at CodePlex, I was able to find another person who was having the same problem, but we weren't able to come up with a resolution. Personally, I think it has something to do with VS 2008 or the VS 2008 SDK. In fact, this could even be a problem with the Visual Studio 2008 Shell Isolated Mode Redistributable package. Regardless, it was not an ideal installation experience.

Once IPS is running, it's just like running Visual Studio - good news for .NET programmers. The tool does need some work though. Adding references, for instance, is not nearly as easy as it should be. In fact, it requires you to manually copy the dll to your bin directory and then editing the project file to include it. Hardly ideal. Also, I had an "oddity" during a debugging session. I had a solution with three console application projects, one of which would I knew would throw an exception. Even after setting another project as the startup project, the project I wanted to ignore kept being run. I had to remove the project from the solution in order to run.

Despite my setbacks and the couple of quirks I've run across, I like IronPython Studio. It's makes for an transition from Visual Studio. And since this is a CTP, I'm guessing that the final product (whatever "final" means) will have addressed these problems. I'm very optimistic about it's future.

Speaking at Central Ohio Day of .NET 2008

I just got confirmation that I'll be presenting "Looking Out for IronPython" at Central Ohio Day of .NET on April 19. I gave a talk on WCF at the event last year when it was still the Cincinnati-Dayton Area Code camp and it was really a great experience. Not only am I looking forward to attending this event again, but I'm excited to talk about IronPython. The more I learn about Python, the more excited I get about the language. It's not any single feature that does it for me, but a series of small details. Here's one I just learned at Michipug last week:

   seq = "Central Ohio Day of .NET".split()
   isInSeq = "Ohio" in seq
   print isInSeq
   >>>True

   isInSeq = "Michigan" in seq
   print isInSeq
   >>>False

That code is written exactly the way I think: Is "Ohio" in my sequence? Elegant.