Nice to see another entrant in this space, offering functionality beyond LINQPad⁰ and the old SnippetCompiler¹. Microsoft has experimented with a REPL of their own² but there's nothing official yet.
Mono's REPL³ (MIT X11/GNU GPL; 2008) still has some rough edges on Windows. CS-Script⁴ (MIT; 2009) seems to have received the widest use but was hampered by a weird license until recently. Microsoft MVPs have stepped into the ring with scriptcs⁵ (Apache; 2013) based on the brand new Roslyn tech.
The sweet spot between a more full featured IDE like VS, LINQPad, or SharpDevelop and a REPL environment has not been explored very much so far. Even ScriptCS is more of one-off execution kind of setup, although they do have a REPL.
Filling this gap is what I tried to achieve with CShell. When I started, the Mono REPL was quite a bit ahead of Roslyn still, but now Roslyn overtook it. I'm planning to switch to Roslyn for the execution engine and use NRefactory for the code completion still (especially now that Roslyn is open source).
Where I want CShell to go, is it being a light-weight IDE with a focus on iterative execution. I use LINQPad evey day for DB stuff for example, but when I want to write progressing code, usually exploring some kind of data space - where I test each line, plot some charts, look at the data the variables contain - then there's no real competitor so far for C#. Either you have Matlab, R one one side, or linear code execution environments on the other.
Filling this gap is what I tried to achieve with CShell. When I started, the Mono REPL was quite a bit ahead of Roslyn still, but now Roslyn overtook it. I'm planning to switch to Roslyn for the execution engine and use NRefactory for the code completion still (especially now that Roslyn is open source).
Where I want CShell to go, is it being a light-weight IDE with a focus on iterative execution. I use LINQPad evey day for DB stuff for example, but when I want to write progressing code, usually exploring some kind of data space - where I test each line, plot some charts, look at the data the variables contain - then there's no real competitor so far for C#. Either you have Matlab, R one one side, or linear code execution environments on the other.