I found it pretty simple to do and somewhat useful for longer scripts.  It will be nice in the future to have first class support for IronPython in Visual Studio 2010.

You should have IronPython 2.0 Final and Visual Studio 2008 Professional or Better* installed to complete this demo.

Create a python file to debug:

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#debug.py
class Foo:
def __init__(self, name=None):
    self.name = name
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    f = Foo("LVS")
    print f.name

From Visual Studio, open the IronPython executable (ipy.exe). If it doesn’t do so for you, add the ipy.exe as an existing project.

From the Solution Explorer, right-click on Properties and set the Command Arguments property.  Use “-D” to tell ipy.exe to create debugging output, “-i” to start an interactive session at the end of debugging and add the full path to the script you made before.

Properties Dialog

Click Ok.

Open the script you created earlier in Visual Studio and place breakpoints as desired.

Adding a Breakpoint

Run the script in debug mode (F5).

If you added the “-i” argument in step 3, after the last breakpoint is released it will launch an interactive session for you.  You will be able to inspect your script at this point, much like the immediate window in Visual Studio.

Interactive Console

* I tried this in the Visual Studio 2008 Team Developer Edition and the Visual Studio Express Edition.  The Express Editions do not work as they don’t allow you to open the ipy.exe as a solution item. Sorry “hobbyists”, we’ll see if the Express sku’s of Visual Studio 2010 will target IronPython / IronRuby.

I started looking into some CI products and ended up watching a screencast on CI Factory. I was amazed at my initial reaction (yuuk!)! I’m not knocking CI Factory directly, rather the fact that I need to configure a product that will configure a suite of products for me sounded like something that would be overly complicated to maintain / use. This is not what I need to stay agile and keep a client involved.

So in my tinkering with RoR, I ran into CruiseControl.rb. This product was easy to install and I already had the required dependencies from my RoR work. It works out of the box for RoR, but needs a little love for building .Net apps.

I started out by deciding that I was going to continue to use MSBuild for building my projects and use CrusieControl.rb to do the CI and other tasks not including the actual build. This would allow me to continue to work in Visual Studio as normal without changing a development process already underway.

So far I have integrated Rake into Visual Studio, created a rake file in my solution and created a task to build my projects. It works great from the command line (rake dotnet_build) but when calling from CruiseControl, it throws an error that is probably complaining about not having resgen.exe in the path – that will be taken care of soon and I plan on publishing a full post on each step in the near future.

I am very excited by the possibilities that Rake and Ruby bring to my .Net development. I’m already thinking of how to integrate this with the new IIS 7 API to have a Capistrano like feel to deploying my ASP.Net apps.

For both new and experienced developers, Jim Losi has been a tremendous resource for guidance and assistance within the .Net community. Jim has assisted me personally via forum post, a code sample, a note of confidence, debugging a project, or contributing a library when needed. I have witnessed Jim help countless others on the LearnVisualStudio.Net forums as well in the same manner. Jim lives on the other side of the country from me and as such I am surprised to be able to get a hold of him in the late hours of the night and the early hours of the morning.

Jim remains steadfast in his dedication to ensure that those who ask him questions understand the answers and he encourages those individuals to continue the cycle and help each other. Jim consistently assists others in a professional and friendly manner and demonstrates a level of commitment to others rarely seen within the .Net community.

Jim has worked very hard to help many of us out in the community and has never asked for anything in return. He is a colleague, a mentor, and an example for the community at large. Jim Losi is the ideal candidate for Visual Developer – Visual C# MVP.

Jim Losi has been a great influence to me in the last year and a half and ‘m really hoping Microsoft recognizes him this year for all of his hard work. If you have a testimonial for Jim as well, please forward it to me and I’ll make sure it makes its way to Microsoft by way of Bob Tabor / LearnVisualStudio.Net.

I introduced a colleague to SubSonic yesterday and found myself telling her how much faster I can get an app out the door because I don’t have to build a custom data access layer. I felt like I was telling her a secret…

For the Java environments, JRuby has hit another milestone and they are confident enough to hang it out there for RoR developers to give it a shot. Building a Ruby interpreter on Java instead of C allows you to extend the Java classes, deploy Rails applications to a web server as a WAR file, and provide similar portability to RoR as Cold Fusion enjoys.

For the Microsoft environments, the IIS Team announced they have implemented Fast CGI for IIS 7. This will make RoR on IIS more efficient and easier to deploy. Rob Conery has the drop on this as well as instructions for how he was able to make this work. Rob is the founder of a framework for .Net inspired by Rails called SubSonic and if you write ASP.Net 2.0 applications, you need to take a look.

Both of these recent events seem to indicate that in organizations that already have a significant amount of infrastructure built up in either Java or .Net will not have to do much at all to make Rails run in the same environment. I think this will lead to greater adoption because it will be faster and easier to deploy and configure, making it an easier sell to your development manager, VP, etc., or for you to sneak it in.

So when I heard about this story, I thought to myself there was something more I could do than pitch them $20 – I could write them an application.  They could get a PC laptop for a much cheaper price and really make the donations she received stretch further.  I started into motion by getting a CodePlex project set up and creating a very small demo to send to her.  They were excited and said the new application would be very helpful and encouraged me to continue with development.

Now I kicked back into planning mode.  I thought that it would be important to do this the right way and not just slam out some code in a day or two and send it their way.  As the week progressed I got a message from the woman that someone had offered a sweet deal on equipment similar to what Stephen Hawking has.  She would no longer need my application and she was thankful for the week and a half that I had worked on the project.  This information combined with the fact that it was the holiday season and I had plenty of other things fighting for time in my schedule caused the project to be shelved indefinitely.

Some time later, I was walking to a coffee shop near my office with a friend who had a nephew that was born with a cleft palate.   He was listening to my story and told me that there are other people like his nephew that would benefit from this.  This led me to think that there would still be some value in continuing this project.

I have now started planning again.  I have several ideas and have started a project plan document.  I’m looking to use an open source text to speech engine to support further goals of eventually making this application cross-platform.  If you would like to help in any way I could use assistance in development, documentation and of course testers!

That day came today! I received a license and media for Vista Business: