IronPython and IronRuby CTPs for .NET 4.0 Beta 2

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock (or maybe just aren’t tracking developments in the .NET community outside of IronPython), Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 this week. Of course for me personally, the most important feature in Visual Studio 2010 is C# 4.0 new dynamic type (also available in Visual Basic, but since VB already supported some level of late binding it’s not exactly “new” to VB).

For those of you who want to experiment with this cool new feature, may I present IronPython 2.6 CTP for .NET 4.0 Beta 2. If you can’t think of any cool things to try with this new feature, the VB team blog has some scenarios to get your started.

Also available: IronRuby CTP for .NET 4.0 Beta 2 if you’re more into gemstones than snakes.

These are preview releases, which means they’ve gone thru basic testing. If you find any bugs, PLEASE report them via the usual channel. I wrote in my Post 2.6 Roadmap post, “we are committed to shipping the RTM of our .NET 4.0 version the day that Visual Studio 2010 is publicly available” but that means shaking out the bugs between now and then. We need your help so we’re ready to go by Visual Studio 2010 launch – March 22, 2010 as per Soma’s blog.

BTW, Alcides Fonseca suggested we call this release “IronPython 2.6 N4” since it’s designed to run on .NET Framework 4.0. I like that. What do you think?

I Hate Global.asax

One of the things I’ve always loved about ASP.NET is how easily extensible it is. Back in 2000, I had a customer that wanted to “skin” their website using XML and XSLT – an approach Martin Fowler later called Transform View. We were working with classic ASP at the time, so the solution we ended up with was kind of ugly. But I was able to implement this approach in ASP.NET in a few hundred lines of code, which I wrote up in an MSDN article published back in 2003. In the conclusion of that article, I wrote the following:

Using ASP.NET is kind of like having your mind read. If you ever look at a site and think “I need something different,” you’ll most likely find that the ASP.NET architects have considered that need and provided a mechanism for you to hook in your custom functionality. In this case, I’ve bypassed the built-in Web Forms and Web Services support to build an entire engine that services Web requests in a unique way.

Nearly ten years later, I finally ran into a situation where ASP.NET failed to read my mind and doesn’t provide a mechanism to hook in custom functionality: Global.asax.

I always thought of global.asax as an obsolete construct primarily intended to ease migration from classic ASP. After all, ASP.NET has first class support for customizing request handling at various points throughout the execution pipeline via IHttpModule. Handling those events in global.asax always felt vaguely hacky to me.

However, what I didn’t realize is that there are some events that can only be handled via global.asax (or its code behind). In particular, Application_Start/End and Session_Start/End can only be handled in global.asax. Worse, these aren’t true events. For reasons I’m sure made sense at the time but that I don’t understand, the HttpApplicationFactory discovers these methods via reflection rather than by an interface or other more typical mechanism. You can check it out for yourself with Reflector or the Reference Source – look for the method with the wonderful name ReflectOnMethodInfoIfItLooksLikeEventHandler. No, I’m not making that up.

The reason I suddenly care about global.asax is because Application_Start is where ASP.NET MVC apps configure their route table. But if you want to access the Application_Start method in a dynamic language like IronPython, you’re pretty much out of luck. The only way to receive the Application_Start pseudo-event is via a custom HttpApplication class. But you can’t implement your custom HttpApplication in a dynamically typed language like IronPython since it finds the Application_Start method via Reflection. Ugh.

If someone can explain to me why ASP.NET uses reflection to fire the Application_Start event, I’d love to understand why it works this way. Even better – I’d love to see this fixed in some future version of ASP.NET. You come the only way to configure a custom HttpApplication class is to specify it via global.asax? Wouldn’t it make sense to specify it in web.config instead?

In order to support Application_Start for dynamic languages you basically have two choices:

  1. Build a custom HttpApplication class in C# and reference it in global.asax. This is kind of the approach used by Jimmy’s ironrubymvc project. He’s got a RubyMvcApplication which he inherits his GlobalApplication from. Given that GlobalApplication is empty, I think he could remove his global.asax.cs file and just reference RubyMvcApplication from global.asax directly.
  2. Build custom Application_Start/End-like events out of IHttpModule Init and Dispose. You can have multiple IHttpModule instances in a given web app, so you’d need to make sure you ran fired Start and End only once. This is the approach taken by the ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support. 1

So here’s the question Iron Language Fans: Which of these approaches is better? I lean towards Option #1, since it traps exactly the correct event though it does require a global.asax file to be hanging around (kind of like how the ASP.NET MVC template has a blank default.aspx file “to ensure that ASP.NET MVC is activated by IIS when a user makes a “/” request”). But I’m curious what the Iron Language Community at large thinks. Feel free to leave me a comment or drop me an email with your thoughts.


  1. FYI, I’m working on getting the code for ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support released. In the meantime, you can verify what I’m saying via Reflector.

Functions that Create Functions in Powershell

Since I started using Powershell, I’m very picky about what I let on my path. I feel it’s much cleaner to create aliases or functions rather than letting all kinds of crud creep into my path.

Recently, I installed the latest IronRuby release and discovered there’s a whole bunch of little batch file wrappers around common Ruby commands like gem and rake. While being able to simply type “igem” or “irake” is much easier than typing ir "C:\Program Files\ironruby-0.6.0\bin\igem", I didn’t want to pollute my path – even with a product from my team. Instead, I wanted to create a Powershell function for each of those IronRuby-fied commands. Furthermore, I wanted to avoid manually creating a function for each Ruby command – these batchfiles are literally identical except for their name, so I figured it would be possible automate the function creation in Powershell. Here’s what I came up with:

$iralias = get-alias ir -EA SilentlyContinue
if ($iralias -eq $null) {return}

$irbindir = split-path $iralias.Definition

function make-rubyfunction($cmd)
{
  $cmdpath = join-path $irbindir $cmd
  set-item function:global:$cmd -Value {ir $cmdpath $args}.GetNewClosure()
  write-host "Added IronRuby $_ command"
}

("igem","iirb","irackup","irails","irake","irdoc","iri") |
  %{make-rubyfunction $_}

I start by getting the ir alias, which I’m setting in my traditional fashion. The Ruby command files are in the same directory as ir.exe, which is what ir is aliased to. If the ir alias isn’t set, I quit out of the script without setting anything.

The make-rubyfunction function is the primary workhorse of this script. You pass in a command name as a string, and it uses set-item on the function provider to create a new function. Note, I had to explicitly create this function in the global scope since I’m running the set-item cmdlet inside a script.

Getting the value for the function took a bit of head banging to figure out. I’m used to Python, which automatically closes over variables, so my first attempt was to set the function value to something like { ir $cmdpath $args }. But Powershell doesn’t close automatically, so that fails since $cmd isn’t defined inside the function. I asked around on the internal Powershell alias, and someone pointed me to the new GetNewClosure function in Powershell v2. In other words, Powershell only supports manual closures, which is kind of wonky, but works OK for this scenario. I create a new script block that references in-scope variable $cmdpath and GetNewClosure automatically creates a new script block where that value is captured and embedded. More info on GetNewClosure in the docs.

Now, I’m using Win7 exclusively at this point, so depending on a v2 feature didn’t bother me. However, if you’re using Powershell v1, you could still accomplish something similar using text substitution. Here’s my original (i.e. pre-GetNewClosure) version of make-rubyfunction

function make-rubyfunction($cmd)
{
  $cmdpath = join-path $irbindir $cmd
  $p = "ir `"$cmdpath`" `$args"
  set-item function:global:$cmd -Value $p
  write-host "Added IronRuby $_ command"
}

I’m using Powershell’s standard text substitution mechanism to create the function value as a string. Note that I’m escaping the dollar sign in $args, so that does not get substituted the way $cmdpath does. GetNewClosure feels cleaner, so that’s how I ended up doing it, but both ways seem to work fine.

Finally, I pass an array of IronRuby commands down the pipe to make-rubyfunction. I love the pipe command, though it feels strange to use parentheses instead of square brackets for list comprehensions like Python and F#!

Anyway, the script – as usual – is up on my SkyDrive. At some point, I want to do something similar for common IronPython scripts like pyc and ipydbg. Until then, hopefully someone out there will find it useful (like maybe the IronRuby team?).

IronRuby 0.3

Last week was Mix09, Microsoft’s annual conference for web development and design. There were some big announcements – Silverlight 3 Beta, ASP.NET MVC RTM, TDS support for SQL Data Services, new drops of Azure and LiveFX SDKs and I’m sure a bunch of other things that I’ve forgotten.

Of course, by far the most important thing that shipped at Mix09 was IronRuby 0.3.

Jimmy has the details on the new release and John Lam did a talk at Mix on dynamic languages in Silverlight. I haven’t seen an announcement, but it also looks like there’s a new version of AgDLR – aka the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK – as well.

Early Christmas from Iron Languages and DLR

Tomorrow may be Thanksgiving, but the Microsoft DevDiv dynamic language teams are trying to make it feel like Christmas with three separate pre-holiday releases.

  1. IronPython 2.0 RC2 
    We were really hoping to only have one release candidate, but we ended up with a couple of significant bugs that we couldn’t push off to 2.0.1. With December holidays coming soon, RC2 has a pretty small window before we declare RTM so now is the time to download the release and try your code out.
  2. IronRuby 1.0 Alpha 2 
    There’s been zero blog traffic on this, just a notice on the IronRuby mailing list. As per said notice, “Notable features” include “the inclusion of iirb.bat, igem.bat, irails.bat, irake.bat”.
  3. New DLR CodePlex Project
    The DLR source has been available as part of IronPython for over a year but now they have their own home on CodePlex. Check out the Release Notes for an overview, reads some Docs and Specs or just download their initial v0.9 beta. Their v0.9 beta is synced with IPy 2.0 RC2 (and their v0.9 final will sync with IPy 2.0 RTM) but it also includes synced versions of IronRuby and ToyScript in both source and binaries. Plus, Sesh has promised “weekly code drops”. Finally, unlike IronPython and IronRuby, DLR is using the discussion section of their CodePlex site – I’m eager to see how well the new-ish discussion/mailing list integration works.

So there you go, new versions of IronPython and IronRuby plus a whole new DLR CodePlex project to boot. Enjoy.