I've been playing around with Grails on my Ubuntu box for the past week and really like the ability to do fast web development while still retaining all the power that the JVM provides.  Unfortunately, it also comes with the baggage of Java, which became pretty apparent once I needed to map a date time object.

Since I still have a day job, and I don't see us switching from .NET anytime soon, I thought I would spend a little time with ASP.NET MVC and IronPython to see where things are. I was able to find a sample MVC sample application on CodePlex which made use of IronPython in the views and the global.asax. The one feature I really wanted support for was writing controllers in python, apparently that's in the works but not currently supported.  Not much python in the sample, but pretty neat to know it works.

... Well actually at some point it probably did.  I'm using the first beta release of ASP.NET and some things have changed since the IronPython sample came out.  Needless to say, the sample no longer works, I get an HttpParseException with the message "HtmlHelper' object has no attribute 'ActionLink'"

Pretty strange message huh?  In C# I can find this method no problem. Long story short, IronPython can't use extension methods like C# can.

At some point the MVC team moved the HtmlHelper.ActionLink method from System.Web.Mvc to Microsoft.Web.Mvc.  The latter is the ASP.NET futures assembly, which provides a bunch of extension methods that they may add to the System DLL at a later date.