If you have ever used EMacs or Visual Studio a great feature is tab completion.  In Visual Studio it work pretty amazingly well and is called Intellisense (which goes beyond simple tab completion).  I was watching a IronPython demo and I noticed that the speaker had tab completion going.  I asked how to get this feature turned on.  A simple command line argument will do the trick.

Starting the IronPython console (IPY.exe) with -X:TabCompletion will do the trick!

C:\Program Files\IronPython-1.0>ipy -X:TabCompletion
IronPython 1.0.60816 on .NET 2.0.50727.42
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

I have been playing with dynamic languages in the form of IronPython and Pharlanger PHP (e.g. PHP .NET).  I have not held a very high opinion of dynamic languages.  Why?  I think the with dynamic typing and their interpreted nature you are simply move issues that could be addressed at compile time (syntax errors and type problems) to runtime and I never consider that to be a good idea. 

Certainly there are benefits in rapid prototyping that are very benefical.  Let me talk about a different benefit.  This case was debugging.  I have a C# library that displays a popup window similar to Outlook's toast window (popup windows that fades in and out).  It worked great until I started using Windows XP's built in dual monitor support (very cool if you have a laptop and an extra monitor).  When I configured the dual monitor support my toast window started appearing on the second monitor and not the primary as I wanted.  The code is a bit tricky with several timers to fade the window in and out, so debugging is a bit of a challenge.  I decided that making a simple program to explore the problem might be the easist way to solve the problem.  Then it occurred to me that this is perfect thing to use IronPython for.

I was using SystemInformation.SystemInformation.VirtualScreen to get the screen size.  I decided to type some code into IronPython to explore this a bit further.  The transcript is below.  I found that VirtualScreen was returning the height and width of the combined screens.  I looked at the doc (imagine that) and though that PrimaryMonitorSize was really what I wanted.  The simple test below confirmed this.   IronPython make the test quite easy.  Very cool

C:\Program Files\IronPython-1.0>ipy -X:TabCompletion
IronPython 1.0.60816 on .NET 2.0.50727.42
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
>>> import clr
>>> clr.AddReference("System.Windows.Forms")
>>> from System.Windows.Forms import *
>>> print SystemInformation.VirtualScreen.Bottom
768
>>> print SystemInformation.VirtualScreen.Right
2048
>>> print SystemInformation.PrimaryMonitorSize.Width
1024
>>> print SystemInformation.PrimaryMonitorSize.Height
768
>>> print SystemInformation.PrimaryMonitorSize.ToString()
{Width=1024, Height=768}
>>>