DLR + IronPython + Silverlight in 5 Steps (with pictures)

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A simple step by step¹.

1. Download the Silverlight DLR SDK

2. Map the binaries (the folder with Chiron² et. al.)  in your PATH Environment variable.

3. Download this starter template.

4. Run chiron /w from the command line in the directory of the starter.



a) Make sure you're in the correct folder
b) The command is chiron /w
c) You'll get a message that Chiron is serving at http://localhost:2060a

5. Navigate to http://localhost:2060 and hit index.html to see what's up.

 
The starter³ should make it easy to get up and running. Open the app.py and app.xaml files and you will be able to modify the xaml and write code to customize it into your own creation.

1. Michael Foord aka Voidspace is the guy when it comes to IronPython. He wrote a book on it. He has a "getting started" tutorial that is much more extensive if you want more details. His tutorial isn't as terse so I thought I'd write this one for people who just want a step by step before poking around. There are other people like JimmyThinking who offer a lot of help to beginners but lean towards IronRuby.

2. The name Chiron for a tool makes me think about a few things: first, being born out of time since most BigCo shops today name computers and tools in a hollow, mechanistic fashion. In the salad days of computing on Unix, tools had cool names like ed or yacc. The second thing I think is that Dmitri (and I'm sure there's an "et. al.") must be a cool, interdisciplinary fellow to come up with a name like that.

3. The exchange in the sample is from Swahili classes at Rusinga Primary School in Nairobi.

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nRegex 9

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I've been getting up to speed with Silverlight and decided to rewrite nRegex to leverage it as a client side processor for what the original nRegex shipped to the server with AJAX calls.  In the original nRegex this worked fine until you had to deal with large documents but once you were in the large document space things began to go awry. My solution was to allow for a "manual" evalution of the regular expression (rather than a time interval based evaluation) but I'm hoping that Silverlight will prove an elegant solution since not only can it harness the power of the client but it also has features to run code asynchronously.

In my first iteration I leveraged a lot of the JavaScript interop for the Silverlight control and avoided XAML for display. I think in the next iteration I'm going to spend more time on displaying results via XAML.

Feel free to present any comment or suggestion on nRegex and its direction.

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DDD

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Not to be confused with D&D... Domain Driven Design for those of us who don't keep up with all the acronyms.

I'm seeing this more and more in places I lurk. DDD is the next buzz like Agile?

Next steps: relisten to Hanselminutes, ALT.NET Podcast, lurk on DDD site, and pay more attention on the ALT.NET mailing list.

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Which is better, IronPython or F#?

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Both.

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