More IronPython

Since my earlier post on the topic, I find that I've been picked up by the nifty aggregator site IronPython URL's.

At that point, I'd just started using the implementation as part of the build process for the project I'm working on at the moment — while the bulk of the choreography is handled by running devenv against the main solution, the interstitial work is done through the pre- and post-build events. In most cases, .BAT-file behaviour is enough to just invoke an executable or two with a simple command line, but anything with string handling or iteration now gets pushed into IronPython.

Why IronPython in the build? Well, given that we're building with DevStudio 2005, .Net 2.0 is already installed, so IronPython's xcopy-style install means that we can put into a project's tools folder without having to perform any change-of-enviroment on the build machines (a big no-no).

What sort of tasks are we doing?

Quite a variety —

• Doing everything that needs version stamping from creating AssemblyInfo.cs files from templates, through web.config references to the generated assemblies to the installers and merge modules.
• Doing pretty much everything in managing installer creation from driving Wix to create the initial single language installers, version stamping them, and then extracting the language transforms and embedding them into the master installer

From that base, I've now moved into using IronPython as a tool for helping our system test team put scripts together. Unfortunately even 2.0Alpha1 doesn't have an implementation of parser, so it can't be directly used with FitNesse and PyFit; but even so, it still makes a great utility for CPython scripts to invoke to get at awkward or tedious bits of the Win32 APIs like

• ACLs on files and registry keys
• the current thread identity
• Assembly full-names

or even less esoteric things like DLL versions (even though pulling those out of PE format directly isn't that difficult) -- and without needing to check that all the necessary CPython Win32 add-on libraries are present.

It has also proved useful for quickly putting together scripts to drive web applications, by giving simple script-level access to all the System.Net and System.Xml facilities.

 

tl;dr — IronPython for the win for its xcopy-style install and out-of-the-box access to Windows APIs.