UPDATE: Looks like the CLR already has something similar to what I did here. Meet the latest class with a superhero sounding name, ExpandoObject
Warning: What I’m about to show you is quite possibly an abuse of the C# language. Then again, maybe it’s not. ;) You’ve been warned. Ruby has a neat feature that allows you to hook into method calls for which the method is not defined. In such cases, Ruby will call a method on your class named method_missing. I showed an example of this using IronRuby a while back when I wrote about monkey patching CLR...
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...
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...
In my last post I set the stage for this post by discussing some of my personal opinions around integrating a dynamic language into a .NET application. Using a DSL written in a dynamic language, such as IronRuby, to set up configuration for a .NET application is an interesting approach to application configuration. With that in mind, I was playing around with some IronRuby interop with the CLR recently. Ruby has this concept called Monkey Patching. You can read the definition in the Wikipedia link I provided, but in short, it is a way to modify the behavior of...
Disclaimer: My opinions only, not anyone else’s. Nothing official here. I shouldn’t have to say this, but past history suggests I should. P.S. I’m not an expert on DSLs and Dynamic Languages ;) This week I attended a talk by John Lam on IronRuby in which he trotted out the Uncle Ben line, with great power comes great responsibility. He was of course referring to the power in a dynamic language like Ruby. Another quip he made stuck with me. He talked about how his brain sometimes gets twisted in a knot reading Ruby code written using metaprogramming...
Way down the road, it would be nice to be able to build ASP.NET MVC applications using a DLR language such as IronRuby. However, enabling DLR language support isn’t free.
There are going to be places in our design that are specific to statically typed languages (such as Attribute based filters) that just wouldn’t work (or would be too unnatural) with a dynamic language.
Ideally we can minimize those cases, and for the ones we can’t, we need to make sure the extensibility of the framework allows for extending the system in such a way that we can provide a DLR friendly...