.net scripting languages [closed]

Answer 1

IronRuby

Answer 2

IDE Scripting (think VBA):

Visual Studios Tools for Applications (VSTA) which supports VB and C#. It's the current supported microsoft solution and is meant to replace VSA and VBA. They neglected it for a while but have taken it back up. VSTA is like VBA and exposes an IDE. The end used will need to install VSTA on their machine which is free.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38806

Straight Text scripting:

PowerShell

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kebab/archive/2014/04/28/executing-powershell-scripts-from-c.aspx

Roslyn (this is superseding CodeDom but is still in the preview state)

https://roslyn.codeplex.com/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/roslyn.aspx

CodeDom (a little heavier than you might want)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y2k85ax6.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/12852/Compile-and-Run-VB-NET-Code-using-the-CodeDom

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/3289/Dynamic-Code-Generation-and-Code-Compilation

DynamicMethod (I like this because I can define the code as a function with specific parameters and returns. It narrows scripting to exactly what you want)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.reflection.emit.dynamicmethod.aspx

Answer 3

https://sharpscript.net/ I just found this, no previous experience of it. This has similarities with Javascript, has support for templating syntax, it has various discovered and not yet discovered applications especially making websites/webapps.

Answer 4

F#

Windows Scripting with VB Script

Answer 5

Answering in 2018:

You might want to look at MS ClearScript https://github.com/Microsoft/ClearScript.

It is JavaScript (V8-engine) that you can embed into a .NET app.

Answer 6

Part of the question is what do you want the language to be like. Maybe you want the full power and flexibility of C#. Or maybe you want it to be a little simpler so people can use it who may not be real programmers.

I just posted my Silk library on GitHub for .NET. It takes the second approach and has a language without excessive punctuation and isn't case sensitive. It also is very loose with data types.

It's very easy to use. Just register the functions your code makes available to the script, compile the source to bytecode, and run it. When one of your functions are called, an event is raised and your code can implement that function.