IronPython + Silverlight is a wonderful combination, but sadly there is currently no way to pre-compile your IronPython.

Why would you want to do this?

a) Performance. Currently as soon as you load your XAP file, Silverlight compiles your referenced python modules. This leads to a performance hit and a long wait for your application's users. And it repeats every time you load.

b) Security. I can't speak offhand to how "secure" Python bytecode is (I know you can dissasemble Java and .Net back to basically pure code, often with comments); but this will at least not drop your raw source code into your XAP for everyone to see. The resulting code should be CLR Bytecode in a DLL file, which at least means nobody will be able to pick your Python code right out and use it as their own.

The first draft of this system is likely to be a hosted Silverlight application which converts Python code to an assembly via IsolatedStorage.

As things evolve, I am going to attempt to have a proper command line compiler (Boo's CLI compiler is capable of producing compiled-for-silverlight code, so I know it's doable.)

LICENSING NOTE: Some code in this package may be derived from code licensed under the Microsoft Public License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html). Any packages (usually patches to IronPython itself or derivations of modules from IronPython) which carry this license will be marked as such; otherwise, all original and non-derivative code (e.g. any members of this package that don't explicitly indicate MS-PL licensing) should be treated as LGPL (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.php)