Importing Static Methods with IPy

Like .NET, Python uses namespaces to avoid name collisions. However, the semantics are a bit different. If you want to use a type or function from a a given namespace in Python, you have to import it into your current scope. For example, if you want to use the Python datetime built-in module, you would import it into the current scope and use it like this:

Notice that when I import a Python module this way, it's scoped into it's namespace, which forces me to use the entire namespace scoped name to access the type. Of course, that gets tedious quickly, so Python provides a way to import a type from a specific namespace into your current scope like this:

With IronPython, you can do import .NET namespaces as well. Here's that same code using the standard .NET DateTime class.

What I didn't know is that you can import static methods & properties from .NET types into the current scope using the same syntax. Here's an example:

Being able to import a static method into the current scope is pretty convenient. Thanks to my teammate Jimmy for cluing me into this IPy feature.

One caveat though: in Python, you can import an entire namespace into your current scope. You can do that with .NET namespaces, but not with .NET types

from datetime import *         # this works
from System import *           # so does this
from System.DateTime import *  # this doesn't work

Update: Michael Foord pointed out that if you import Now as I describe above, it places a DateTime object representing the time you imported it into local scope, rather than placing the underlying get_Now static method in local scope. So while DateTime.Now always returns a new value, Now never changes. Sounds like an IPy bug to me, but I'll have to circle back with the team to be sure.

Morning Coffee 164

• Big news since my last Morning Coffee post was the announcement of Live Mesh. I've been running it for about a month, and I'm really digging it. Make sure you check out the team blog and watch the developer tour video (be on the lookout for IPy about half way thru the video)

ALT.NET

• I had a great time @ the ALT.NET open space conference last weekend. I was somewhat distracted on Saturday as due to a family communication mixup, I had to bring my son Patrick with me. Jeffrey Palermo shot a cute video of him (3 minutes in) where he explains that he's at the conference "to be with my dad". Having a five year old is a little distracting, but everyone was amazingly cool with having him around. When he gets a little older I have no doubt he'll be attending conferences and leading open sessions.
• I did a session on F#, but it felt kinda all over the place. I hadn't touched F# in a few months and it showed IMO. Matt Podwysocki was there to help keep the session from devolving into mass chaos. Thanks Matt.
• My favorite session of the conference was Scott Hanselman's "Are We Innovating?" talk, which I think originated from a question I asked him: There are many examples of large OSS projects in other dev communities that get ported to .NET (NHibernate, NAnt, MonoRail, etc). Can you name one that's gone the other way? I can't.
• I took Matt's advice and joined the local ALT.NET Seattle group.

DyLang Stuff

• Martin Maly posts about how dynamic method dispatches are cached in three different layers by the DLR. You shouldn't care about this stuff if you're a DLR language user, but you will certainly care about it if you're a DLR language builder.
• I'm really excited to see Phil Haack (whom I met F2F @ ALT.NET) is experimenting with IronRuby & ASP.NET MVC. True, I'd rather it was IPy, but his Routes.LoadFromRuby would work with Python with very little code change.
• Note to self, take a deeper look at Twining, the IPy database DSL by David Seruyange.
• Daily Michael Foord - Ironclad 0.2 Released. Ironclad is a project to implement Python's C extension API in C# so that IronPython could load standard Python C modules like SciPy and NumPy. So far, they're able to load the bz2 module. 

Other Stuff

• Congrats to Brad and Jim for shipping xUnit.net 1.0.
• Everyone seems to be jumping on the functional C# coding bandwagon. Bart De Smet's series on pattern matching in C# is currently at eight posts. Now Luca Bolognese is in on the action, with three posts so far on functional code in C#. I like how Luca keeps writing that the C# syntax is "not terrible" for functional programming. Again, why suffer thru the "not terrible" syntax when you could be using F# instead? (via Charlie Calvert)
• I need to take a look at VLinq. Charlie and Scott Hanselman both mentioned it recently.
• I would like to have been in the conversation with Ted Neward, Neal Ford, Venkat Subramaniam, Don Box and Amanda Silver.
• I haven't had any time to play with XNA of late, which means the great list of GDC videos Dave Weller posted on the XNA team blog will remain beyond my ability to invest time for now.
• There's a new drop of Spec# from MS Research. IronRuby is using Spec# heavily as I recall.

Caps' Season Ends

I should be mad. Angry. Furious even.

The Capitals season ended tonight in large part due to what I think was a horrific non call in the second period. The on-air commentators were stunned that the officials allowed the goal after the Flyers Patrick Toresen took Caps' goaltender Huet out of the play by body checking Shaone Morrison into him. Sami Kapanen had the whole net to shoot at and didn't miss. The NHL quickly trotted out an excuse justification for the call, but what else are they going to say. "Yep, the officials blew the call. It only decided game 7, no big deal"?

As I said, I should be pretty upset. Especially after what sounded like a poorly called game four (no comment from me - I didn't see the game).

However, I can't help but think back to the last Friday in November when the Caps had the worst record in the league @ 6-14-1 and had just promoted their minor league affiliate's coach to the big leagues. If you had told me then - almost exactly five months ago - that the Caps would go 37-17-7 over the remaining 3/4ths of the season, win the division in their last game and take battle back from a 3-1 series deficit to force a game seven, I would have wondered what you were smoking.

This season has been a gift for Caps fans and I've relished the few games I've gotten to see, even the one that sent us home.

Furthermore, even though they lost, these playoffs are a promise of future success. I tell my kids all the time that the only way to get good at something is to work hard while you're bad at it. Playoff hockey is no different. Most of the Caps had little or no playoff experience going into this series and it really showed thru the first three games. But they kept at it and played much better over the last four games of the series. They went 2-2 in those games, but the two losses went to overtime. A little more luck (or better officiating) and the Caps are headed to Pittsburgh instead of the golf course. 

Speaking of Pittsburgh, look back at the Penguin's performance in the playoffs last year. Like the Caps, Pittsburgh is loaded with young talent that were thin on playoff experience. Also like the Caps, they went home after the first round. However, unlike the Caps, they only managed one win against an Ottawa team they had beaten three times down the stretch in the regular season. Furthermore, when facing elimination, the Penguins laid a goose egg. However, as much as I hate to complement the Penguins, things are very different this year. Here's hoping the early playoff exit has a similar effect on the Caps.

Bumping around my music collection for a song that captured my mood, I came across Getting Better from Tesla's debut album.

All that rain, outside my window
But I'll live on I know
Its gettin' better every day
Soon the sun will shine, through my window
When it's gonna come
You know I really, couldn't say
But I know, it's gettin' better every day

Swapping "season" for "day" kills the rhythm and rhyme, but it captures how I feel.

Thank you Washington Capitals for a great season. I look forward to many more to come.

Thank you Bruce Boudreau for jumping in the deep end unafraid and turning this season around.

Thanks you Washington fans for turning out in such force. Who would have thought the Verizon Center would be considered "most electric arena"?

Finally, thank you to Ted Leonsis for enduring the criticism, for turning Washington DC into a hockey town and for ensuring I'll be able to wear my #8 Ovechkin jersey until my kids are in high school.

Morning Coffee 163

Between MVP summit last week, ALT.NET this past weekend and an internal brown-bag presentation yesterday, my unread email and blog posts have piled up. Most of the following is old news, but I wanted to get something out. Especially since I feel a case of Caps Fever coming on that will force - force you understand - me to head home early today.

DyLang Stuff

• My teammate Srivatsn demonstrates how to make your static C# types act more dynamic in order to interop better with DLR languages. For example, by implementing GetBoundMember and SetMemberAfter, you can support setting arbitrary attributes on a C# class from Python. Cool.
• Today's Michael Foord link: On Testing: Some Programmers Refuse to Get it. He's responding to a comment by Allen Holub suggesting that having 110k of test code for 30k of production code is "a real indictment of the language" (IronPython). I'm with Michael on this, Holub's suggestion is laughable and worse radically uninformed. I like the way Larry O'Brien (who passed on Holub's comment in the first place) describes the views of tests from inside and outside the agile community. I also like his description of tests as "quality diodes".

Other Stuff

• Werner Vogels posts about a new Amazon EC2 feature: Persistent local storage. Basically, you can create an empty volume up to a terabyte in size and then mount it to your images as a drive. The objective seems to be able to run relational databases in the images, rather than being limited to S3 and SimpleDB. Kinda interesting, but given Google's announcement last week, I think the shine is off EC2 a bit.
• This past weekend's Twitter outage has Dave Winer re-thinking the idea of building networks on a single point of failure. While obviously I agree with the concept, I don't agree with his solution that "We need some big infrastructure companies to get into this game". While there are some big blog infrastructures out there, most of that network was built on a massive number of small infrastructures. Why wouldn't the same thing work for microblogging?

Wanna Work on IPy + VS?

We've hired a few people around here recently (including me obviously). However, if you have a burning desire to work on IronPython (or IronRuby) and Visual Studio, we're still hiring:

An important aspect of developing these dynamic languages [aka IronPython and IronRuby] is providing support in the Visual Studio IDE. This includes editing features (color-coding of source code, intellisense, go-to-definition, refactoring, etc), debugging features (breakpoints, data tool tips, etc), ensuring a language-specific look-and-feel (interactive console, etc), and integration into the Visual Studio project system. It includes integration with the various designers like the WPF designer via CodeDOM, and development of project templates for various scenarios (Silverlight 2 app, WPF app, ASP.Net website, VSTT unit tests, etc). We also want to integrate with Visual Studio technologies like profiling and code coverage. Your job will be to ensure that developers using dynamic languages built on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) have the best development environment in Visual Studio.

We’re looking for a talented developer with exceptional programming ability and a passion for dynamic languages. Experience in these areas is a bonus though not strictly required: building developer tools like editors and debuggers, compiler implementation, reflection, dynamic languages, VM implementation, performance measurement and/or optimization, C#. Applicants should have a BS/MS in computer science or equivalent, and three or more years of industry experience.

'rents Rock the Red

My brother saw this picture on The Peerless Prognosticator and noticed something cool.

Photo by Greg Fiume/Getty Images

Those are my parents, screaming their head off after Brashear scored in game one. I especially like my mom rockin' the old school Caps gear.

Flyers Knot Series @ One

Ever hear the phrase "if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all"? That's about how I feel about the Caps effort in this afternoon's loss to the Flyers.

There are two possible explanations for today's game:

1. After going 11-1 to finish the season and coming from behind in the third period of game one, the Caps were just emotionally drained and couldn't get up for today's game.
2. The Flyers have figured out how to shut the Caps down completely.

Personally, I think it's explanation #1. If it's #2, it's gonna be a short series.

I had written a bunch of observations, but go read Japers instead. He hit all the points I was going to and more.

Update - I almost forgot, good to see Patrick Thoresen (the Flyer who took a Mike Green Slapshot to the groin Friday) wasn't as seriously hurt as initially thought.

Caps Win Game One With a Three Goal Third

OK, I'll admit it. When the Caps were down 4-2 after two I started having, you know, unsure thoughts. Thoughts like:

"We should be proud to have even made the playoffs".

"It's a young team, they're just getting started, this year doesn't matter much".

Oh me of little faith. :)

The Caps took game one of their best-of-seven series with the Flyers in fairly dramatic fashion, scoring three goals in the third period, including a nifty steal by Ovechkin for the game winner. Game winning goal, assist and eight hits on a supposedly more physical team == quite a first playoff game for Alex the Great.

I'm sure folks that more regularly blog the Caps than I do will recap the game better than I will. Peerless Prognosticator already has and I'm sure Japers will by tomorrow. But here are a few of my thoughts.

• The stats say we did well in the faceoff circle, winning 58% (36 of 62). However, their first goal was scored when the Flyers got a clean faceoff win in our end, so I was acutely attuned to every faceoff loss from that point forward. My gut impression was that we hadn't done as well as we did.
• Remember, I don't get to see the Caps very often. So it was kinda surreal to see a Caps team able to cycle the puck down low so well. The Flyers seems fairly helpless to stop us.
• On the other hand, we didn't seem to do so well getting the puck out of our own zone. On Philly's second goal, we managed to get it out of the zone, but turned it over in the neutral zone which lead to a 3-on-2.
• With the exception of the second half of the second (where the Flyers scored three times in under four minutes), I thought the Caps out played the Flyers most of the way. The third period was especially good for the Caps. Not only did they score three, the held the Flyers to a mere three shots, and NONE after Ovechkin scored what turned out to be the game winner. My mom always says a two goal lead is the most dangerous lead in hockey. that sure was true tonight.
• Both Ovechkin and Brashear showed great patience on their goals. There's a great picture of Ovechkin waiting for Biron to commit over @ Off Wing Opinion.
• The refs pretty much let them skate. There was what I thought was a missed tripping call at one point and my brother pointed out Richards was standing in Huet's way in the crease on Briere's second goal, but frankly it was such a pretty pass I doubt Huet could have gotten it. Caps do need to do a better job clearing their crease.
• There's a bit of a controversy surrounding the Caps' fourth goal. The Caps were on the power play and Green unleashed a shot that hit Flyer's winger Thoresen in the groin. The refs didn't whistle the play dead and the Caps scored while Thoresen writhed on the ice in pain. Apparently, the rules are that you don't blow the whistle unless the player's life is in danger, so it looks like a good non-call. But I'm guessing Philly fan doesn't agree.

Game two, Sunday 2pm Eastern/11am Pacific. You'll know where I'll be.

Morning Coffee 162

• Another nice thing about the new job: I'm working in the vicinity of some good friends. I was over in building 42 yesterday and made it a point to stop by Pat Helland's office yesterday and spend an hour or so chatting about the new gig. Pat is down the hall from David Hill, whom I worked with on Architecture Strategy. Back in my building, we're down the hall from the VSX folks including my friends Ken Levy and Gareth Jones. I'm sure there are more folks I know around, but hey it's only my second week!
• I'm a big fan of Carbonite, which I use to back up all the digital media on my home computer. With two little kids, we have lots of digital photos as you might imagine . However, one thing that bugs me about Carbonite is that it doesn't back up video files by default, you have to go in on a folder by folder basis and select "'Back up Video files in this folder" from the context menu. Given how much trouble this "feature" has given me, I imagine less techie folks don't even realize their video files aren't getting backed up. However, I will say the latest version of the Carbonite Software at least makes it easy to find files that aren't backed up. A quick sweep revealed around a dozen folders that had un-backed-up video files in them, which I promptly fixed.
• The big news yesterday was the new Google App Engine, which looks to give you access to virtualized infrastructure that sounds similar to what GOOG is rumored to use internally. I like Dave Winer's comment that this enables "shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians." Given Google's history w/ Python - Python's BDFL Guido van Rossum works there - it's no surprise that Google App Engine (GAE?) runs on Python, though apparently they "look forward to supporting more languages in the future". I'm guessing "more languages" == Ruby, maybe Erlang too.
• I wonder if/how Google App Engine will affect Ruby on Rails momentum? If there's a significant lag before App Engine supports Ruby, will that drive developers to Python web stacks like Django? (Django is included in "the box" with App Engine)?@ PyCon, I was surprised at the intra-language animosity I observed. I wonder how many Python developers are secretly hoping Google never ships Ruby support. I highly doubt Google would do that - they want to tap the exploding RoR market like everyone else - but I'd bet it would really take the wind out of Rails' sails if they did.
• Today's Michael Foord Link: Embedding IronPython 2, Examples of the DLR Hosting API. You can read the DLR Hosting spec, but it's pretty out of date so Michael's article helps fill in some of the gaps.
• Looks like PowerShell has gotten the open source community treatment in a project called Pash. While I'm sure others are excited about PS on Linux or Mac, I'm excited to see PS running on Compact Framework. I wonder if it would work with XNA?
• Speaking of XNA, XNA Console is a new CodePlex project that provides an IPy console to manipulate your XNA based game on the fly. Python is no stranger to game development - Civ IV for example provided mod capabilities via python. Alas, the compact framework can't run IPy today, so neither can XNA on Xbox. But wouldn't it be cool to hack your game in IPy running on a 360 using the messenger kit? (via IPy URLs)
• Bart De Smet gets functional, writing type switch and pattern matching in C# 3.0. I guess it works, but it sure is ugly. Why not just use F# and be done with it?
• Soma announces that the VC++ Feature Pack has shipped. Somewhere, I assume, there is much (some?) rejoicing.

Morning Coffee 161

• Huge perk of the new job: new hardware. I had to give up my Dell workstation but I got a Lenovo T61p dual core widescreen laptop, an HP dc7800 dual monitor quad core desktop and a Polycom CX700 IP phone. I'm really digging the Lenovo's integrated fingerprint reader - no more password login - but I'm most impressed with their integrated driver management software. Sure beats the heck out of hunting for dozens of updated drivers all over the place like most vendors for you to.
• Minor downside to all my new toys: I spent most of my first week on the job installing and configuring said new toys.
• Caps will face the Flyers in the first round of the playoffs which starts Friday. I have a feeling that I'll be feeling poorly Friday around 3pm and have to head home early. :)

DyLang Stuff

• Apparently, Michael Foord isn't getting enough exposure on this blog. :) He left a comment to remind me to mention the IronPython URLs link blog he writes along with Mark Rees and Seo Sanghyeon.
• Speaking of Michael, his employer Resolver Systems just launched a new product: Resolver One Quant.
• Still speaking of Michael, he's quoted in the InternetNews article Python Fans Take Aim at the Enterprise.
• My teammate Jimmy Schementi posts a preview of his spare time project "Silverlight on Rails". This RoR plugin lets you declaratively specify if you want your RoR controller code to be accessed remotely via AJAX and run on the server or if you want that code to be downloaded to the client and run in SilverLight. Very cool stuff.

Other Stuff

• Don Syme provides some insight into the F# producization process. There's going to be an update to the "Research release" later this month and a CTP of the "Product release" later this summer (Brian McNamara has the CTP details). I am looking forward to these releases, though I'll probably be too busy w/ IPy to experiment much with them.
• Speaking of F#, Matt Podwysocki continues his adventures with F# with a look at tuples, records and discriminated unions. Of the three, I find discriminated unions the most interesting since there isn't anything like it in other languages I've used.
• Gregori and Chris both announce the release of Unity 1.0. Congrats guys! But if I don't have time to hack around with the latest F# release, you can imagine I won't be getting to Unity any time soon...
• Jeff Atwood recommends you build your application UI first. Furthermore, he does a good job selling the value of paper prototyping as well as introducing the concept of PowerPoint prototyping. Money quote: "You don't want something too powerful."
• Via LiveSide I discovered James Hamilton's blog. Normally, hardware infrastructure isn't really my bag, but I find his ideas around using ISO standard shipping containers as modular data center building blocks fascinating. For example, check out this post that suggests sticking modular data centers in condos would be cheaper than building data centers!Subscribed.
• Speaking of ISO, you may have heard Open Office XML was ratified as an ISO standard. Obviously, there was a lot of controversy around this, but Miguel de Icaza lists of what he considers major community wins from the standardization process. Anything that "pushed Microsoft into more open directions" is a good thing IMO.

Rock the Red

Japers says all there needs to be said: CONQUE(RED)!

With a 3-1 win over the Panthers, coupled with a Hurricanes' 4-3 loss to the same Panthers the night before, the Washington Capitals are the Southeast Division champions.

These words are music to my ears: Capitals Playoff Tickets On Sale Now!!!

The win was their 7th straight, and they went 14-4 since the trade deadline @ the end of February. They finished the season 43-31-8 after starting the season 6-14-1. That's a 20 game swing (from 8 games under .500 to 12 games over) in 61 games. That's frakking amazing. Had the Caps played at that clip all season, they would have ended up with around 109 points, which would have been good enough for first in the east, though still short of Detriot's 113 points (and they still have a game to play). Ovechkin isn't the only Cap who should be a shoo-in for a trophy. Coach Bruce Boudreau should be a lock for the Adams.

I just spoke to my parents, who were at the game and have almost no voice left after no doubt screaming their frakking heads off or chanting M-V-P in the stands. I also spoke to my brother, who lives in 'Canes country these days but was on his way back home from England. Until he talked to my father earlier today, he didn't even know the 'Canes had lost last night. He sounded slightly stunned, but that might be a by-product of being on a plane all day.

What an amazing year. Can't wait to see what they do in the playoffs.

Go Caps Go. Rock the Red.

Morning Coffee 160

I took most of last week between jobs and have spent much of this week getting machines setup, access to builds, etc. Furthermore, RSS Bandit ate my feedlist and I am still soldiering on sans mobile phone so I was pretty much unconnected for about a week and a half.

IPy Stuff

• Laurence Moroney demonstrates how to configure a web site project in VS08 to use Dynamic Silverlight’s development web server Chiron. I looked at turned it into an exported template, but I think the Start Options are stored in the suo file and I’m not sure how to include that in the template. Maybe it could be set w/ a macro or at worst a GAX recipe?
• If you’re a regular reader, you might as well get used to the name “Michael Foord”. He’s a developer @ Resolver Systems, makers of the IPy based Resolver One app/spreadsheet hybrid I’ve written about before. He’s also the author of the upcoming IronPython in Action book and the maintainer of Planet IronPython and the IronPython Cookbook. I’m going to try very hard to only link to Michael at most once per day. Frankly, that’ll be tough.
• Today’s Michael Foord Link: Michael turned his PyCon talk on IPy + SL2 into a series of articles entitled IronPython & Silverlight 2 Tutorial with Demos and Downloads.
• Ken Levy (who now sits just down the hall from me) clued me into the 1.0 release of IronPython Studio, which is a free IDE based on the VS08 Shell for IronPython (based on code from the VS SDK). Big new feature in this release is support for the integrated VS08 Shell, which means it’ll snap into your existing VS08 installation (well, not express) rather than forcing you to install the 300 MB isolated shell.

Other Stuff

• Caps had a BIG win last night when they needed it most. Now they’re tied with Carolina for the SE division lead, but they lose the tiebreaker so unfortunately, they can’t make the playoffs without help. ‘Canes have to head back home last night to play Tampa Bay, they have to win tonight and Friday to clinch. Loss in either gives the Caps control of their own destiny. Caps are only one game back of Ottawa, Boston and Philly, none of whom have played well down the stretch. It does mean I have to root for the frakking Penguins to beat Philly, twice.
• Now that I'm in a job where I'll be traveling occasionally, I really appreciated Scott Hanselman's travel tips, though I'm not sure "Don't look like a schlub" is in the cards for me.
• Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that Scott Guthrie blogged that the ASP.NET MVC Source Code is available on CodePlex. The project name is “aspnet” not “aspnetmvc” which makes me wonder if they might release the source to more ASP.NET stuff over time.
• Speaking of Scott Guthrie, today he blogged about unit testing in SilverLight. Jeff Wilcox appears to have the definitive post on the subject, including links to the SilverLight testing framework (it’s included in the SL Controls source code release). He also provides a prebuilt “SilverLight Test” project template for easy download. Personally, I really like the in-browser test runner. I wonder how hard it would be to hook that up to DySL so you could write your tests in IPy? (given that IPy doesn’t have attributes, I’m guessing there’d be at least a bit of work involved in making this happen)
• Speaking of SilverLight, apparently the next version of Windows Mobile (i.e. 6.1) will support it. Since I'm in the market for a new phone anyway, I'm thinking of getting one of these. Also, it's nice to see a marketing site for WM 6.1 using Silverlight instead of Flash like WM 6.0 marketing site does.(via LiveSide)
• Ted Neward turns the news that MSFT is releasing XAML under the OSP into a long and fascinating history lesson that is well worth the read. I’m going to skip commenting on it, beyond advising you dear reader to read this if you haven’t already, except to wonder: how many sides does a “Redmondagon” have?