Episode 8 of Jon Udell’s The Screening Room features Jim Hugunin, creator of Jython and now IronPython, a .NET implementation of Python. For Python fans, this is a fascinating screen-cast to watch. They’ve done some great work on IronPython, which just hit its 1.0 release this week.

Some of the cool things I liked about what I saw:

• Integration of the Python language with the Visual Studio IDE (including the Debugger)
• Full access to the .NET framework (The Avalon demo was cool)
• Optional integration of CLR methods into Python objects (String.Trim() vs. String.strip())
• The PowerShell demo was also pretty cool
• In the early part of the screen-cast, Jim takes a benchmark program and increases performance of the program dramatically by refactoring one function into C#. Shows off the optimization opportunities possible with the platform, along with the great integration between IronPython and other .NET languages

IronPython looks like a really fun thing to start playing with and could be a really great addition to a Windows development group for prototyping. I am a big fan of dynamic languages and think this is a great addition to the .NET tool set.