A night of firsts: VS2010, Dynamics, Python

Tonight, I installed Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 for the first time. I know I am late to the game, but I had to give it a whirl since I found some free time this afternoon. One feature of .NET 4.0 I wanted to try out was the dynamic keyword with Python scripting. So, here is my first hello world program using dynamic, with the help of this walk-through.

class HelloWorldDemo:

    def run(self):
        return "hello world"

Here is the C# code needed to run it. Yes, I used WPF as my driver, but don’t worry about that.

...
using IronPython.Hosting;
using Microsoft.Scripting.Hosting;

namespace WpfWithPython
{
    public partial class Window1 : Window
    {
        ScriptRuntime py;
        public Window1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            py = Python.CreateRuntime();
        }

        private void MyBtn_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            //Instantiate an instance of this file?!  Yes, it is weird at first.  
            // All the methods and classes in the file will be members.
            dynamic demo = py.UseFile("HelloWorldDemo.py");

            //This is the tricky step.  To create a new object, call it like a member...
            // I think
            dynamic instance = demo.HelloWorldDemo();
            MyText.Text = instance.run();
        }
    }
}

It took me a while to get this little bit of code working unfortunately. If you read the comments, you can see where some of my confusion was found. Overall, it is pretty awesome. I loved LINQ and I am already loving dynamic. There is something new to learn everyday. Maybe F# next…

Unfortunately, I have to say that VS2010, while pretty, is slower than 2008. And, IronPython took nearly 2 or 3 minutes to run some sample code it provided, which is crazy. If the performance problems can be overcome, then I see myself learning more Python and Ruby.

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