Python at Microsoft

At work we mainly use Microsoft technologies, .NET and such like, for our development. As I mentioned previously I’m playing with Python at the moment, and getting on quite nicely. With .NET being a framework, aimed at allowing a variety of different languages to access the same class library, I though

I wonder if you can use Python with the .NET framework?

The rather large Programming Python tome alludes to it being on the cards after the implementation of Jython but no more details than that.

I came across a few dated references indicating that it was possible but, and mentioning very slow reference implementations, all of which didn’t bode too well. Then up popped IronPython from an article by Jim Hugunin. This looked like what I was looking for. But it looked unmaintained, the page not having been updated for a couple of years!

But the story continued. Jim, having moved to Microsoft, was still working on IronPython and it looks like it’s moving forwards apace. The latest beta was released on the 20th of April and it looks like 4 more betas before a 1.0 release.

This discovery makes Python appear even more interesting. A nicely designed, cross platform scripting language with full access to the might of the .NET framework and it’s own good looking web development framework in Django.

So, for anyone else looking around for similar details here’s a brief list of up to date information: