Dave just posted the announcement to the IPy mailing list, Beta 5 has been released. You can download the release from CodePlex. Like Beta 4, this release is available in MSI or ZIP format, with the MSI including the Python Standard Library as an option.

As per the release notes, this is our last planned beta for 2.0 – our next planned release is RC1. So if you’ve been holding off on upgrading to the latest betas or to 2.0 in general, now is the time to upgrade if you want us to fix your bug before we ship 2.0.

I was updating my webdev powershell script today. I wanted to add support for a -browser switch that would automatically launch a browser window the way chiron from the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK. does. I also set the script to serve up the current directory by default. I posted the new version up on my SkyDrive.

While I was working on the script, I thought about how one might shutdown the WebDev server from the command line. That turned out to be much harder. Basically, you have to look thru all the top level windows for one that has “ASP.NET Development Server” in the window text, then you send that window two messages – WM_QUERYENDSESSION and WM_QUIT. Not sure why the WebDev server uses WM_QUERYENDSESSION to shut down it’s tray icon, but if you look at WebDev.WebServer.exe in Reflector, you’ll see the tray icon form overrides WinProc in order to look for message 0×11, i.e. WM_QUERYENDSESSION.

I threw together a quick little C# console app to shutdown the WebDev server and stuck it up on my SkyDrive as well. Source code is up there too. I had to use a bunch of P/Invokes to make it work, or I would have written it in Powershell or IronPython.

Enjoy.

You know, this gets pretty long when I go a week between morning coffee posts.

Dynamic Language Stuff

• There’s a new version of the DLR Hosting spec. One of the biggest changes is the removal of DLR’s pre-canned knowledge of IPy and IRuby. Now, you use app.config to specify DLR languages and map them to extensions. Sesh has the details and a sample. If you only care about hosting IPy, you can use our language specific hosting API which doesn’t require app.config.
• Jimmy pushed out a new version of the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK. He’s on the lookout for a better name, one of his commenters suggested “SilverWhisper Kit”.
• Srivatsn shows how to pass Python keyword arguments to a C# method using ParamDictionaryAttribute, similar to how C# supports the params keyword via the ParamArrayAttribute. Unfortunately, there’s no syntactic sugar for calling param dictionary methods from C#. I wonder, do most people like or dislike the idea of language level support for keyword arguments in C#? I’m guessing most would be against, though I think it’s a cool idea.
• Maybe it’s me, but I’ve noticed an uptick in twitter posts containing “ironpython” of late. For example, via Summize I discovered Joseph Jude’s blog finally where he has posted a time tracking tool he built in IPy as well as his initial IPy learnings.
• Michael Foord, as usual, has been generating quite a bit of good IPy content. He did a tutorial on IPy at PyCon UK,  his book is almost done, he has some interesting thoughts on dynamic language performance and even admits that he likes C#, though not as much as he likes Python.
• Vernon Cole announced that the adodbapi project now supports IronPython 2.0 as well as CPython. This library is a DB-API 2.0 compliant interface for any database that support ADO (note, that’s native ADO not ADO.NET). I love to see Python projects with explicit support for IPy.
• My boss – who apparently will be called “Rem” from now on in the office – saves you “gazillions” by explaining non-positional negotiating strategy and draws the comparison to agile software development. Not exactly related to dynamic languages, but I’d like to see him further explore the relationship super-optimal, non-positional, significantly-hyphenated negotiation and software design. (OK, I made up “significantly-hyphenated”)

Other Stuff

• Don Syme blogs about an update to the F# CTP, a mere week after the original release. One week? That’s more often than even IPy releases. I can’t wait to see what they ship in next week’s release! 😄 Seriously, I hope they can keep the release sprints short, but every week would be a bit crazy!
• Speaking of F#, Matt Podwysocki updates FsTest for the F# CTP and posts about Extension Everything in F#. Unlike C#, which only supports extension methods, F# also supports extensions properties, static methods and events, though like Matt I can’t think of a good use for extension events.
• Still speaking about F#, Andrew Kennedy has a three part series on the new units of measure feature of F#. If you were going to use F# to build the physics engine of a game, I would suspect UoM would be extremely useful. (via Don Syme)
• Oh look, Chris Smith built an F# version of artillery game that uses Units of Measure for the physics code. I’ll bet UoM was extremely useful. 😄
• Talking about Live Mesh at TechEd Australia – where much to my surprise frankly they were demoing Live Mesh Apps – I pointed out to Scott Hanselman that Mesh is running an embedded CoreCLR (aka the same CLR from Silverlight 2). Scott went poking around and posted what he discovered. Looking forward to finding out what he digs up on using CoreCLR outside the browser.
• Speaking of Scott, I need to set up a family video conference solution like Scott’s before my next trip.
• Congrats to Glenn Block and the MEF team for their initial CodePlex source drop! I’ve been hearing about this possibility since Glenn joined the team, so I’m really excited to see it happen. I need to take a look at it in detail (in my copious spare time) because I want to find out how to make it work with IPy.
• Bart de Smet has a whole series (starting here) on Dynamic Expression Trees. However, given that he specifically writes “This blog series is not about DLR itself” makes it seem pretty conceptual to me. Why not talk about DLR expression trees instead Bart?
• I’m sure you noticed ASP.NET MVC preview 5 dropped last week. I really liked Brad Wilson’s discussion of the new view engine design.
• Tomas Restrepo has started publishing his source code on GitHub. Personally, I haven’t published any source code lately but I am using Git for all of my non IPy core work (which is stored in TFS). Like Tomas, I’m still getting the hang of Git but I’m really digging it’s speed, it’s branching and the fact that there’s zero infrastructure requirements. SVN provides the lightweight svnserve, but Git is even lighter weight than that.
• I liked Steve Yegge’s post on typing. I am a touch typer, but I doubt I type 70 words a minutes. I do know where the number keys are without looking though, so I guess that’s pretty good. I remember seeing Chris Anderson demo Avalon WPF long before it was public and being impressed at how fast he could type.

I’m on my way out the door for New Zealand and Australia, but I wanted to push out a few things.

• F# August September CTP is out! Don Syme has the announcement, Jomo Fisher has the link roundup and details are on the brand-spanking-new MSDN F# Dev Center. Major congrats to the F# team. I’ve been running a pre-release version of these bits, and they are a huge step forward if you’re an F# developer.
• I’ve got an article on IronPython in the latest issue of CoDe magazine. Also check out Brad Wilson’s IronRuby article, Ted Neward’s F# article and Neil Ford’s Polygot Programming article.
• Via Michael Foord I discovered that IronPython tester Dave Fugate is back on the blog. He starts with a couple of posts about measuring IronPython performance.
• Speaking of blogging teammates, I think the dynamic languages team has the highest percentage of bloggers in any group at MSFT. All four Program Managers (Dave (lead), John, Jimmy and me), four of five developers (Shri (lead), Dino, Curt and Oleg) and all three Testers (Jim, Dave and Srivatsn). The only non blogger right now is Tomas – who at least has a home page – and  the lead tester which is an open position right now. 11 bloggers out of 12 team members equals 91.67% team blogger coverage.
• I was really impressed with Newspeak when I saw it at Lang.NET so I’m very excited to see they have a new website. No public bits yet, but I like the part where they point out Newspeak “can be implemented independently of Squeak, Smalltalk or any particular VM or IDE”. How about implementing a version on DLR guys?
• Maurice de Beijer shows off embedding IronPython inside a WF application. Kinda cool, but he’s primarily showing off implementing a CLR interface in IPy. How about a WF activity that execute arbitrary IPy code. That would be cool. (via IronPython URLs)
• Ironclad has reached their 0.5 milestone, being able to import numpy from IronPython. BTW, guys – I’m not sure commenting out one line that appears to be unreferenced qualifies as a “monstrous caveat”. Congrats guys! (via IronPython URLs)

• I took the kids to see Fly Me To The Moon recently. We had to trek to Monroe (about 30 minutes away) because it’s a special 3D movie, and it was only playing there and in downtown Seattle. The movie’s story is insipid – three flies stow away on Apollo 11 – but all the space shots were actually kinda cool. It sure felt like they wanted to be scientifically and historically accurate about the the actual mission (well, other than the part about the flies). Patrick really liked it (he wants to build a rocket in the back yard) and Riley sat thru the whole thing with a minimum of fussing.
• I’m a big fan of Joe Biden, so I’m really happy Obama picked him to be his running mate.
• I know it’s old news but what the frak was John Edwards thinking? I like his policies, but the arrogance it takes to run for president when you know you’ve got that skeleton in your closet is mind-boggling.
• On the other hand, watching the Sean Hannity and guest’s hypocrisy on Edwards’ affair, only to watch them scramble like cockroaches when Colmes points out McCain had admitted to having an affair was frakking hilarious.

OK, onto geek stuff:

• My new boss Dave Remy has moved to a new blog. If you’re curious what he was up to for the 10 months he was away from Microsoft, he’s happy to share.
• IPy and IRuby developer Curt Hagenlocher (aka Iron Curt) is blogging. Cue the Ozzy…I AM IRON CURT. Or don’t. Anyway, he dives in the deep end of the pool – no “hello world” lollyblogging for Iron Curt – digging into the stack implications of rethrowing exceptions and debugging emitted IL.
• Srivatsn writes about static compilation of IPy scripts. Note, we’re not talking about static typing – it’s still the same good-old dynamically typed IronPython, just packaged up as an assembly, rather than as a bunch of .py files. Note, if you’re interested in compiling IronPython, you should check out the PYC sample we published as part of Beta 4.
• Speaking of IPy Beta 4, Shri Borde posts about the COM dispatch support which is enabled by default as of Beta 4. If you’re driving COM automation clients (like Office) from IPy, this is a huge improvement over the old mechanism.
• Jeff Hardy has released a new version of NWSGI, a managed version of Python’s Web Service Server Gateway Interface. My understanding is that this would allow any Python web stack written against WSGI to run in IIS with IronPython (subject to IronPython’s compatibility with CPython). Jeff’s been documenting his efforts getting Django running with NWSGI on his blog. Awesome work Jeff! (Thanks for the correction Seo!)
• I never really bought into the “Attention Economy”, but Chris Anderson’s economic analysis of his DIY Drones site traffic was fascinating.
• Lutz announces “it is time to move on” from Reflector and there was a collective horrified scream in the .NET community. He’s handing it over to Red Gate, who promised they “will continue to offer the tool for free to the community”.
• I missed this when he posted it in June, but I really liked Nikhil Kothari use of the DLR in Silverlight to cut down on the XAML verbosity in his ViewModel action binding.
• Brian McNamara previews the new Add Reference and file ordering support in the upcoming F# CTP. I’m really looking forward to the project-to-project reference support. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten burned because my main project recompiled but my test project didn’t. You just get used to hitting Rebuild All instead of Build. As for file ordering, it’s a bit of a bummer that F# requires it, but the new experience is hella better than editing the project file by hand. I’m really looking forward to the new CTP.