IDE and OS integration
Interactive environments are an essential part of any software development platform. The majority of scripting solutions come with a simple REPL included. While more complex richer IDEs are usually developed by third parties.
Instead of developing its own REPL CS-Script makes a strong emphasis on a dedicated rich IDE. The choice of IDE instead of REPL is a recognition of the fact that the complexity of the production level scripting is by far higher than the 'educational' by nature use-case of REPL. Thus, an industry-standard IDE is a more appropriate choice.
When developing stand-alone scripts you have two IDEs to choose from:
CS-Script integration with Visual studio comes in two forms.
If you want to be able to open any script file in Visual Studio with CS-Script specific shell context menu, you can use "Shell-X" for that. Just install it from Chocolatey:
choco install shell-x
And then configure it to handle *.cs files by copying the content of the <CS-Scrip>\lib\ShellExtensions\Template folder to the C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\shell-x\cs\01.CS-Scriptfolder. This will create CS-Script menu item in your explorer when you right-click any *.cs file.
- Shell-X was a part of CS-Script installation for quite some time but now it is an individual product for generic Windows Explorer extensions.
The script file will not be just loaded in VS but the appropriate project infrastructure will be created on the fly. Thus, you will be able to take advantage of the full power of VS and edit, execute and debug your script as any other C# code.
This extension delivers the same experience as provided by shell extensions but without leaving Visual Studio. See Visual Studio Gallery page for more details.
While arguably nothing can compete with the power of Visual Studio in many cases the 'peoples editor' Notepad++ is a more attractive and practical alternative.
CS-Script products family include a powerful 'CS-Script (IntelliSense)' Notepad++ plugin. While editing (with true IntelliSense), executing and even debugging the scripts you can also benefit from the lightning-fast nature and rich functionality of Notepad++.
The plugin also offers an interesting deployment opportunity. It includes a copy of the CS-Script engine thus the only thing you need to work with CS-Script C# scripts on any Windows with .NET (v4.0{"+"}) installed is a copy of Notepad++ with this plugin enabled. The plugin also allows you to package your scripts so they can be brought and executed on other systems without the need for CS-Script to be installed.
The plugin home page contains plenty of details about the product but to put it simply "the plugin brings true VS experiences in Notepad".
Project support:
IntelliSense:
Another great and lightweight option is the CS-Script extension for Sublime Text editor. The user experience is very similar to Notepad++:
You can also use a built-in debugger, which is a no-dependency debugging solution that is available with any deployment of CS-Script. It is an experimental feature that was triggered by user feedback and does not require any additional tools and simply allows using a web app as a debugger. Read more here.
CSS -wdbg script.cs
