Say you’re building a web application and you want, against your better judgment perhaps, to allow end users to easily customize the look and feel – a common scenario within a blog engine or any hosted application. With ASP.NET, view code tends to be some complex declarative markup stuck in a file on disk which gets compiled by ASP.NET into an assembly. Most system administrators would first pluck out their own toenail rather than allow an end user permission to modify such files. It’s possible to store such files in the database and use a VirtualPathProvider to load...
Last July, I blogged about an IronRuby ASP.NET MVC prototype Levi and I put together with John Lam and Jimmy Schementi of the DLR team. It was really rough around the edges (and still is!) One of the benefits of doing that prototype was that it inspired all the work around action and controller descriptors in ASP.NET MVC (something I need to write more about later) which decoupled us from exposing reflection in our public API and improved the overall design of ASP.NET MVC greatly. This had the nice side-effect of making the implementation of IronRuby on top of...
This afternoon we released a refresh of our DLR/IronPython support for ASP.NET, now called “ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support”, on our CodePlex site. This was originally part of our July 2007 ASP.NET Futures package, along with several other features. As updates to these features were made available, we would have liked to remove them from the package, but we wanted to wait till everything within the package was updated. Well that time has come. This CodePlex release contains two exceedingly simple sample applications, one for WebForms and one for ASP.NET MVC. It’s compiled against the latest DLR assemblies, and...
UPDATE 02.17.2009: I posted about a newer version of this prototype for ASP.NET MVC RC
Update: I updated the source today. It now has minimal support for layouts. It needs more improvement for sure. In June, John Lam wrote about a demo he gave at Tech-Ed 2008 where he showed IronRuby running on ASP.NET MVC. He posted the code for the demo online, but it relied on an unreleased version of MVC, so the code didn’t actually work. Now that Preview 4 is out, I revisited the prototype and got it working again. I use the term working...