The "VS Interactive" as you call it, or perhaps simply a good interactive development experience is an integral part of the dynamic language world. The VS SDK IronPython sample which demonstrates hosting of IronPython within Visual Studio offers a small glimpse one direction, the new Silverlight DLR Console sample that Keith pointed out is a glimpse different direction. There are lots of other possibilities as well.
For example the ASP.NET futures Visual Studio integration (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9323777E-FE78-430C-AD92-D5BE5B5EAD98&displaylang=en) goes a little further than the IronPython VS integration sample which has been part of the VS SDK for a while (and which has been the initial exploration into static analysis and intellisense support for Python in the editor, rather than analyzing dynamically executing state). The ASP.NET Futures now has slightly more intellisense support - for controls that are present in the HTML markup, and the Request and Response objects. For example if you have text box in the HTML markup called "text1", you can type text1 (dot) and get completion help inside Python. This is another direction altogether, and they are all challenging and interesting. To answer the original question which direction the refactoring is headed ... right now all the focus is on the runtime itself, so the only fair answer I can give is: "I really don't know yet", but once the runtime has solidified, it seems that the languages benefiting from executing on the runtime would like to benefit from common hosting or some kind of interactive development experience that you are envisioning. Martin -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Sax Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 6:06 PM To: 'Discussion of IronPython' Subject: [IronPython] DLR and VS-Interactive This is more a DLR than an IronPython question. There are two 'dynamic' aspects that are covered by the DLR extension to the CLR. One is runtime support for efficient dynamic typing. The other is the hosting side: console interface, integration with Visual Studio, etc. These are useful for other (non-dynamic) languages as well. Case in point: F# has an interactive console in Visual Studio, but is compiled and statically typed. This second aspect looks more like an extension of the Visual Studio SDK, if it wasn't taken straight from the VS Integration samples from the VS SDK. In other words: my impression is that the current DLR is made up of two separable parts: 1. The actual DLR, which enables efficient dynamic typing on the CLR. 2. "VS-Interactive", a set of extensions to the Visual Studio SDK that turn Visual Studio into an interactive development environment. Is this where the refactoring is headed? Jeffrey Sax Extreme Optimization _______________________________________________ users mailing list users@lists.ironpython.com http://lists.ironpython.com/listinfo.cgi/users-ironpython.com _______________________________________________ users mailing list users@lists.ironpython.com http://lists.ironpython.com/listinfo.cgi/users-ironpython.com
