ASP.NET dynamic language support is open source

I'm happy to finally announce that the ASP.NET dynamic language support is now open source:

Download IronPython and ASP.NET integration

For a full IronPython release with the Python standard library, download IronPython 2.7 Alpha 1.

This release contains the source code to Microsoft.Scripting.AspNet.dll, located in the src directory, licensed under the Apache License (Version 2). It will be available in the source repository for IronPython in the very near future, but don't hesitate to start sending in patches. This release is compatible with IronPython 2.7 Alpha 1.

Background

This download enables IronPython as an ASP.NET programming language. To create a new IronPython ASP.NET WebForms project, simply copy examples\web.config and examples\bin, and use examples\hello-webforms.aspx as a reference. A redistributed copy of the IronPython 2.7 Alpha 1 binaries can be found in the examples\bin directory; all files except Microsoft.Scripting.AspNet.dll, the IronPython ASP.NET integration, are from the IronPython 2.7 Alpha 1 release.

For more detail on getting started, here’s a simple walk-through of making the “hello-webforms” app.

Package

Here's what's in the zip file:

• /License.html - The Apache License, Version 2.
• /dlr-aspnet.sln - VS2010 solution for examples
• /examples - Examples of using IronPython in ASP.NET.
• /examples/Web*.config - configures ASP.NET to use IronPython
• /examples/bin - Microsoft.Scripting.AspNet.dll, the ASP.NET integration, and a redistribution of IronPython 2.7A1.
• /src - C# source code that builds Microsoft.Scripting.AspNet.dll

Upgrading

This release renames the main DLL from Microsoft.Web.Scripting.dll to Microsoft.Scripting.AspNet.dll. If upgrading, you'll have to replace all occurrences of Microsoft.Web.Scripting with Microsoft.Scripting.AspNet. This will primarily be at the top of all aspx pages, as well as in your application's web.config. Also note the version number is now 1.1.0.1, which matches all the other Microsoft.Scripting assemblies.

Feedback

As always, please report issues on the IronPython issue tracker. You can also try to fix any issues yourself and submit a patch. Lastly, you can actually talk to humans on the IronPython mailing list.

Enjoy!

Summer of “Iron”: LINQ, Visual Studio tooling, and the Apache License

New releases and announcements from the “Iron” projects have come out over the last couple days, so I wanted to give you an overview of what’s happening, point out the really cool parts, and reiterate some of the motivations.

From a release perspective, both IronRuby and IronPython released new versions of the DLR-based .NET programming language implementations: IronPython 2.7 Alpha and IronRuby 1.1. Click on the respective release name for the full release notes and downloads, but I’ll summarize a bit here:

IronPython 2.7 Alpha

Install IronPython 2.7 Alpha (includes Visual Studio tooling)

This Alpha release is the first IronPython release working towards Python 2.7 compatibility, and contains a number of bug fixes and performance improvements. It also now requires .NET 4.0 or Silverlight 4; you will need to build from source for down-level frameworks. The installer now includes Visual Studio support for IronPython, rather than being a separate installer, and the source-code for the tools has been open-sourced! Keep reading for licensing information …

IronRuby 1.1

Install IronRuby 1.1

Aside from a bunch of bug-fixes, the latest release of IronRuby adds support for .NET extension methods, meaning that .NET programming patterns that are dependent on extension methods, like LINQ, the Reactive framework, Parallel.NET, etc, are now all usable from Ruby code. For example, here’s a simple LINQ example:

For more information see the 101 LINQ samples ported to IronRuby.

Also, since I never announced the IronRuby 1.0 release on my blog … consider this the announcement.

Apache License, Version 2

IronRuby, IronPython, and the DLR are now licensed under the Apache License, Version 2. To address all concerns around “why” this is changing, it is solely in reaction to feedback about the licensing terms from users and the .NET/Python/Ruby/dynamic-language communities at-large. The Apache License is a more familiar and popular license to those communities than the Microsoft Public License; using it should lower any license-related barriers people encountered in the past when considering these programming-language implementations.

Enjoy!