Using IronPython with NetBeans Python IDE

With the arrival of the IronPython 2.6 beta 1, with ctypes support, the IronPython 1.x only support in IronPython Studio really takes the IDE from a bit dated to seriously obsolescent.

Now, I had tried to get IronPython 2.0 to talk with NetBeans, but hadn't immediately achieved success, so, with less motivation, had put that to one side. Perhaps for similar reasons, a recipe for this wasn't out on Google already -- but now I really needed to crack the problem, I wasn't going to let that earlier abject failure put me off.

Also, since then, I'd seen someone else doing similar stuff to get IronRuby to play with an IDE, in this case, RubyMine, by tinkering with the file actually getting called by the IDE.

Well, checking my Python 2.6.1 command line with -?, and the same for IronPython 2.6 beta 1, they overlapped in almost every essential. So, I tried the experiment of copying ipy.exe,ipyw.exe to python.exe,pythonw.exe in the same C:\Program Files\IronPython 2.6 folder, and then adding the copied python.exe as a new NetBeans Python platform.

And it worked!

So, I created a new python project for platform Python 2.6.0 (as opposed to CPython 2.6.1's Python 2.6), and entered

and ran it, which yielded

24/05/2009 14:28:30
2.6.0 (IronPython 2.6 Beta 1 (2.6.0.10) on .NET 2.0.50727.3074)

which is of course what we wanted.