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The Microsoft .NET platform has a set of classes that offers the benefits of Active Scripting without the drawbacks. This set of classes, named Visual Studio® for Applications (VSA), provides a pluggable IDE and debugger for Visual Basic® .NET.
But support for a hosted design-time environment is only half of the VSA story. The other half is the runtime. It doesn't come with an IDE or a debugger, but it is freely available with the standard .NET platform and has been engineered as the .NET replacement for the COM-based Active Scripting architecture.
While the interfaces look similar, the implementation of scripting on .NET appears to be very different than COM Active Scripting. First, the scripting languages are the same VB.NET and JScript.NET that you use in VS.NET, not a limited subset. second, the code is compiled to a native .NET assembly and executes as native code. Third, .NET allows scripts to directly access all of the .NET BCL, including the interop layer (I'm not sure how script "safety" is enforced in this environment.)
Posted to cross-language-runtimes by Dan Shappir on 7/17/02; 6:57:02 AM
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Scripting and .NET
