Yaay! There’s a FREE version of Visual Studio for IronPython, called IronPythonStudio.

Until now you could use Visual Studio for IronPython, but only with a huge SDK, the ASP.Net Futures, and a lot of patience. Now there’s a separate IDE just for IronPython.

IronPythonStudio uses Visual Studio 2008 as its shell, and looks very impressive. You can use it to create Windows and WPF apps. Big kudos to the IronPython team for this.

There’s a webcast on the Release page, and screenshots here.

Download

You need to grab the following bits:

  1. The Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (isolated mode) Redistributable Package.
  2. The IronPythonStudioSetup.

Note: You don’t need IronPython itself. Version 1.1 of IronPython is installed in the IronPythonStudio directory during the installation.

Installation

To install ÎronPythonStudio,

  1. Run the VS 2008 Shell Package.
  2. Important: Go to the directory where you installed the package, and run vs_shell_isolated.enu.exe. (This step is not documented!)
  3. Run the IronPythonStudio Msi package.

And you’re good to go.

Installation Problems

Shell Redistributable is missing

The first time I installed the VS Shell, it installed with no problem. However, when I ran the IronPythonStudioSetup Msi package, I got the following error:

This setup requires the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell Isolated Mode Redistributable

This happens because there are no instructions to say that the shell package is actually just going to unzip the required setup files, and that you need to run vs_shell_isolated.enu.exe.

Just run vs_shell_isolated.enu.exe and then IronPythonStudioSetup.

Installing on Vista

I installed IronPythonStudio on XP Pro SP2, and haven’t tried on Vista. Apparently you have to run the IronPythonStudio msi as admin.

If you have problems, see this post in the IronPythonStudio forums.