Tutorial: How to create your own plugins for Blaze-IronPythonPlugins (BPP)

On the first post in this series I presented Blaze IPP, which allows for scripting of a launcher using IronPython. Here I tell you how you can write your own plugins from scratch. It will be a short post.

First of all, I assume you’re already running Blaze with the plugin installed.

Let’s create a new directory under “Plugins” to store our new plugins. This way if any future upgrade on IPP brings an ironpython file with the same name, your plugin will not be overwritten. We’ll call it LocalIronPythonPlugins:

Now, configure IPP to also monitor that directory. Call Blaze, right click on it and in the “settings” open the “Plugins” tab. Select “IronPythonHostPlugin”, “Configure” and add the newly created directory (you can either browse to it with “b” or you can paste the path into the text box):

Now that we have a clean directory to work with, let’s create a file called “OpenCommandLine.ipy”. Open it and add the following code:

As you can probably guess, this will create a new command named OpenCommandLine, and when you select it it will open a new command prompt. IPP is clever enough to know that if a command returns a string, it is a program to be executed.

This is just a simple example to get you started. Since this is IronPython, you can use the entire .Net framework and fetch things from the web, open the registry, connect to a remote host or start a service, to give a couple of examples.