Question

Right now I’m working on a project, and the team wants a way to write code and edit it without having to recompile the whole project, so I’ve decided to try and implement a scripting engine.

Having implemented Lua into C++ before, I wasn’t an entire newbie to implementing scripting capabilities into projects. However, we wanted to try and implement straight C# using the Microsoft.CSharp namespace, combined with System.Reflection that was already built in to C#.

So having hearing about this, I poked about in docs and I’ve come up with a prototype that ALMOST works – but doesn’t quite.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.CSharp;
using System.CodeDom.Compiler;
using System.Reflection;

namespace Scripting
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
            builder.Append("using System;");
            builder.Append("using Scripting;");
            builder.Append("class MyScript : IScript");
            builder.Append("{");
            builder.Append("    string ScriptName");
            builder.Append("    {");
            builder.Append("        get { return \"My Script\"; }");
            builder.Append("    }");

            builder.Append("    public bool Initialize()");
            builder.Append("    {");
            builder.Append("        Console.WriteLine(\"Hello, World!\");");
            builder.Append("        return true;");
            builder.Append("    }");
            builder.Append("}");

            CSharpCodeProvider provider = new CSharpCodeProvider();
            CompilerParameters param = new CompilerParameters(new string[] { "System.dll", "Scripting.dll" });
            param.GenerateInMemory = true;
            param.GenerateExecutable = true;
            CompilerResults result = provider.CompileAssemblyFromSource(param, builder.ToString());
            if (result.Errors.Count > 0)
            {
                foreach (CompilerError error in result.Errors)
                    Console.WriteLine(error);
                Console.ReadKey();
                return;
            }
        }
    }
}

The issue I have at the moment is that I want to be able to reference my interface – IScript.cs (which is inside the Scripting namespace and thus, the current assembly) – so that scripts written and parsed in the compiler can access it. Obviously, I added Scripting.dll as a parameter, but it doesn’t seem to be able to be accessed for some reason or another. I am running it in debug so this could be cause for some major facepalmage. What do?

Is there a way to reference the current assembly and pass it to CompilerParameters? Or am I royally screwed / should I rely on creating an assembly for script objects / etc?

Answer 1

It’s probably looking in the wrong directory.

Pass typeof(Program).Assembly.Location to pass the full path.