Here’s a quick quiz. Which of these tasks is harder to accomplish:

1. Getting $6,000 from a variety of groups within Microsoft to pay for a Gold PyCon 2009 sponsorship.
2. Sending PSF a check

If you guessed #2, you’d be right. It’s amazing how difficult the seemly trivial task of “give those PSF folks money” turned out to be. But it’s done now, and you can see the MS logo there on the side of all the PyCon pages.

In addition to the sponsorship, there are some great looking IronPython sessions at PyCon.

• Michael Foord and Jonathan Hartley are running a Developing with IronPython tutorial. Michael is also delivering a talk Functional Testing of Desktop Applications.
• Jim Hugunin is delivering an invited talk IronPython: Directions, Data and Demos
• Dino Viehland is sitting on the Python VMs panel and doing a talk IronPython Implementation
• Sarah Dutkiewicz (aka Coding Geekette) is doing a talk Pumping Iron into Python: Intro to FePy

As I write various python modules (many of which get blogged about), I dump them into a special folder on my machine(s). In my powershell profile script, I set the IRONPYTHONPATH environment variable so that these modules are available to the IPy interpreter (i.e. ipy.exe). To date, I’ve been pretty haphazard about this. But I decided to get a little more structured and put that folder under source control and make it available as “devhawk_ipy”.

So far, I’ve only got three scripts (plus an empty __init__.py) in devhawk_ipy.

• codedom.py (from IronPython and CodeDOM: Dynamically Compiling C# Files)
• ipypulldom.py (from Stream Processing XML in IronPython)
• xml2py.py (from Deserializing XML with IronPython)

Eventually I’ll put my code for working with WPF, LiveFX and Azure into this package, but I’m not happy with where they are yet.

Like ipydbg, devhawk_ipy is up on GitHub. For those non-Git users, I’m will continue to these files up on my SkyDrive. I kind of see SkyDrive as a dumping ground for random content while devhawk_ipy is where stuff goes when it’s a little more polished.

Like IronPython, devhawk_ipy is licensed under the MS-PL. If you’re interested in contributing, feel free to fork and send me patches.