Evolution of C # Interactive functionality

(This article also published in my public number "dotnet daily Essence article", Welcome to the right QR code to pay attention to. )

Preface: Miguel de Icaza in a recent blog post about the evolution of C # interactivity in mono and its related products.

Early

In 2008, Miguel they introduced a C # Shell program in mono (command line only). In implementing this interactive shell, mono implements a number of useful command-line editing APIs for. NET, and also facilitates the development of Mono's own compiler-as-a-service feature. A few months later, a UI interface was added to the shell. As shown in the following:

And also added the plot (Drawing) command:

Xamarin era

At the same time, a similar feature has been integrated in Xamarin studio, namely sketches:

The birth of this tool stems from the need for developers using Xamarin to have a full-featured C # REPL (Read-eval-print Loop, interactive execution Environment) in order to be able to try the relevant code in a timely manner. As a result, they introduced a feature called Inspector, which was originally intended to be used as a debugger helper. The inspector can be attached to a running ANDROID/IOS/WPF thread. Some back-end features are also implemented to provide a visual display of running applications:

The interactive interface of this tool is implemented with HTML canvas, making it easier to add a lot of cool visualizations.

At present, this tool is replaced by Roslyn to achieve the dynamic compilation of code, the effect is even better:

The advent of continuous

Frank Krueger wrote continuous, a plug-in for Xamarin studio and Visual Studio, in order to implement compiler as a service in iOS. With this plugin, you can edit the code to see the effect of the iOS program in real time without additional tools (below video If you don't see it, directly access the video file address: Https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/CXb1RaBU0AAEldo.mp4):

A glorious future

Currently, Miguel they are using a powerful HTML rendering engine to display the results and upgrade the compiler engine. Their next job is to make this C # Interactive environment more powerful. Like what:

Editor's note: In fact, a C # interactive window has been introduced in VS2015 Update1 to achieve a fully functional REPL environment.

The address of this post is at: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2016/Feb-17.html

Evolution of C # Interactive functionality