Hey, everyone! I am helping a client develop a new application that people will run on Windows machines (among other places). It occurred to us that third- party developers will be wanting to extend his application by writing in "familiar" languages like Visual Basic or C#. The "Python for .NET" project, which would have been one potential way to call third-party C# code, looks to have been rather moribund for the last three years, so I hesitated to recommend that we try it.
But I remembered how many positive tweets and URLs about IronPython I have read over the last few months, and so I have convinced the client to give me a day to explore getting the application running under IronPython! The first obstacles fell quickly, but now I am encountering a serious obstacle: "zlib" is needed, and not only does something so basic not come with IronPython (is it a licensing thing?), but my normal Python installation in C:\Python26 does not seem to provide it as a separate DLL - it must be built right into the Python executable, I guess since the import mechanism itself might sometimes need it? There seems to be a Windows-specific version of "zlib" available here: http://bitbucket.org/jdhardy/ironpythonzlib/ But I can't get it working either. Its binary distribution's "IronPython.Zlib.dll" file gets completely ignored by IronPython, so far as I can tell, if I put it on my "sys.path" - but maybe that's because I'm using the most recent IronPython, "IronPython 2.6 for .NET 4.0" (as its "C:\Program Files" directory styles itself)? I have then attempted to compile it myself, by installing Visual Studio Express and then finding and running the "msbuild" command like this: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe IronPython.zlib.csproj I mean, I'm not actually sure that command is meaningful, but I saw it somewhere on Stack Overflow and it at least looks like it tries to compile something. But the result is an utter failure. For one thing, it can't find absolutely anything mentioned in the "csproj" file, whose crazy "<HintPath>" paths are, well, crazy! Who on earth has these libraries sitting in locations under a "Bin" directory? Anyway, I tried to repair some of the "<HintPath>" elements by hand, and got a little further, but now I'm somewhere in a tangled forest of incompatibility involving the version number of something called "System.Core" (which not only sounds important, but is declared by the error message to be a "referenced assembly" which is impressively polysyllabic). So: 1. What do *you* guys do every day when you need "zlib"? 2. Should its binary distro work with .NET 4.0 and I'm not trying hard enough? 3. If I need to compile it, how do I make the "csproj" file work on a system where things are not located in exactly the same places they are on jdhardy's system? Thanks for any pointers - I would love to get this app running on IronPython! Not only would we get "real" threads and get to back down from all of these "multiprocessing" experiments I have been doing (because, wow, secondary processes are *heavyweights* under Windows!), but we'd be able to interoperate with .NET and stuff. Plus then I would have a project that let me play with IronPython like the other cool kids. :-) -- Brandon Craig Rhodes [email protected] http://rhodesmill.org/brandon _______________________________________________ Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ironpython.com/listinfo.cgi/users-ironpython.com
