Alcides Fonseca

I love Python! I love .NET! Therefore I love IronPython. It let’s you do WinForms, Speech, WPF with XAML, work with ANY .NET managed library. I am even using it to do games with XNA! And the Visual Studio integration… It gives Python programmers the tools they dream about: A debugger, intellisense and a compiler.

(I will post about my IronPython adventures in the future).

But there is just one thing that I don’t like in it. It just isn’t Python! It is the Python Language, yes, but it’s not the CPython implementation. I am now stuck with two Python Consoles and there is no way of distinguish IronPython code from regular Python. Of course IronPython is way faster, but sometimes installing it and living with two pythons isn’t always the best choice.

That’s why I really enjoyed the Python.Net. It’s a way of extending Python to access the .NET framework existent in you environment. And now they are making it compatible with IronPython code! And you can still work with all the other python modules (Not all are yet implemented in IronPython). There is only one small problem: It’s alpha software and still very unstable.

I downloaded from the trunk and compiled it with VS2005. I made the binaries available for you and should work fine in Windows XP with .NET framework 1.1, 2.0 and even 3.0 with Python 2.5 except for this bug I reported. Check the readme anyway. It’s also possible to compile to use Mono, but if you really want it, you should be able to compile it yourself ;)