scriptcs it's not an experiment

Just a little over two weeks ago scriptcs started with Glenn’s blog post. In that post he talked about a lightweight approach to authoring C# programs from outside Visual Studio in a text editor without needing a solution or a project. He posted the first preview of a tool called scriptcs which enabled the workflow leveraging Nuget and Roslyn.

The response from the community was extremely positive!!!

Almost immediately after that scriptcs moved from an experiment to a full-fledged OSS project. It started from a Skype call which resulted in Justin Rusbatch and Filip W joining as coordinators.

Immediately after we created a Github organization, a website, a twitter account, a google group and a jabbr chat.

Flash forward two weeks later. To be honest, things have been going forward at such crazy pace, that it really does feel like it’s been fifty two weeks instead :-)

Therefore, it is perhaps a good moment to look back at what has happened so far.

However, before that, it is necessary to emphasize that the response from the community has been absolutely staggering, and has vastly exceeded any of our expectations! This is also a great testament to how needed a good, lightweight, C# scripting environment is.

Scriptcs, owned by the community

This project has moved far beyond Glenn’s initial experiments. It is now 100% owned by the community. All decisions are made publicly and transparently in our Github issues and you are more than welcome and encouraged to particpate!

As such, I think it’s important to highlight that things have really changed at Microsoft, because not that long ago, it would have been virtually impossible to have a Microsoft person involved in coordinating such a project.

There has really been a tremendous amount of contribution from the community. GitHub has been literally lit up with notifications and Twitter has been beaming with activity too.

As of today, on Github, we have:

• 5 repos within the organization
• 17 unique code contributors
• 226 stars
• 54 forks
• 138 issues
• 71 pull requests

What’s been added

As you can see since the last post we’ve had an incredible amount of energy. Here’s a list of the new features that have been added with links for you to find out more.

• Script includes via #load (contributed by @filip_woj)
• A sublime text plugin! Better command line parsing and output (contributed by @follesoe)
• Proper nuget package binding via directly leveraging nuget.core (contributed by @filip_woj)
• Debugging in Visual Studio! (contributed by @dschenkelman)
• Pluggable script engines (contributed by @nberardi)
• Script Packs, scriptcs extensiblity (contributed by @gblock)
• Team city build, nuget packages (contributed by @jrusbactch)
• Chocolatey package (contributd by @mrockx)
• A ton of samples and a dedicated samples repo (see more below)

Samples

Thanks to a great help from community, we are adding more and more samples (which now have their own dedicate repository too).

At the moment we already have:

• Web API self host
• ServiceStack self host
• Nancy self host (contributed by @thecodejunkie)
• Fluent Automation (contributed by @stirno)
• SignalR (contributed by @jonhcoder)
• RavenDB (contributed by @khalidabuhakmeh)
• WPF (with MVVM) (contributed by @khellang)

If you wish to contribute a new sample just head over to the repo! We are always looking for examples, showcasing different uses cases of scriptcs.

Packages feed

We are publishing our nightly builds to our MyGet feed, which is available at

        http://www.myget.org/F/scriptcsnightly/

So you are strongly encouraged to try it out. The initial release is an alpha with version 0.3. This includes:

• scriptcs v0.3.0-alpha (Chocolatey package)
• ScriptCs.Contracts v0.3.0-alpha (Extension point for script packs)
• ScriptCs.Core v0.3.0-alpha (Core service)
• ScriptCs.Engine.Roslyn v0.3.0-alpha (Roslyn-based execution engine)

Contributing to it’s success, “you take it”

Scriptcs will only be succesful with the communities help. If you want to jump in and help out, we’ve put up a contribution guideline document which has worked out great, both for the project and everyone wishing to contribute. We also introduced a new ‘you take it’ label for issues that we explicitly WANT you to take!

We also have a project logo, created by Salman Quazi, and that has helped us develop an identity of the project.

Glenn has also been on dotNetRocks podcast to talk to Carl and Richard about scriptcs! Make sure to grab the podcast.

What’s next?

There is a ton of exciting stuff ahead! And that will be covered in our next post.

We want your feedback and your help!

We’d love to hear from you about any use cases that you might have for scriptcs!

To sum it all up - it’s been really crazy two weeks, and exciting times are ahead! We can’t wait to see where this goes!