What advantages can ScriptSharp bring to my tool kit?

Question

Currently we use jQuery to add RIA goodness to our apps, but recently we have been implementing the Coveo Search engine into our Sharepoint portal and found that ScriptSharp

Answer 1

At my last company I used Script# very extensively. I managed to write some cool controls (in fact an entire client side MVC stack) which I couldnt have done with my knowledge of javascript. However, I wouldn't use it again for several reasons

• The project is closed source and the support is not great (practically non existant since the forum was closed). There are quite a few annoyances when you use it in great depth which could be fixed if you have the source. This becomes a bigger and bigger problem the more you have invested in s# code.
• It's limited to a subset of .NET 2.0, and even then its a leaky abstraction
• Recently Javascript unit testing and VS intellisense for javascript has got a lot better so the importance of static typing is somewhat reduced
• Using it limited my learning of jquery and javascript

The tooling for js is only getting better and until Script# is open sourced, it's at a standstill.

If you're interested in cross compiling, you could also take a look at the http://jsc.sourceforge.net/ project, which lets you use .net 3.5 and compile to JS, Java, Flash or even PHP! Not sure how efficient the code that gets produced is though...

edit: there is a new project called JSIL which also rewrites .net code to JS