VBScriptDotNet

A patched VB interactive that runs with stable releases of Roslyn.

How to run VB interactive

Install binaries

Run with Visual Studio

Ensure that you've installed the latest Visual Studio 2022, .NET desktop workload and .NET 6 SDK.
Open VBInteractive.sln
Set vbi as start project.
Change target framework to net8.0-windows.
Run

Run with .NET 8 SDK

cd Interactive\vbi
Run interactively with dotnet run --framework net8.0
Run interactively on Windows with dotnet run --framework net8.0-windows
Run in script mode with dotnet run --framework net8.0 -- <path-to-vbx-file>
Run in script mode on Windows with dotnet run --framework net8.0-windows -- <path-to-vbx-file>

Available features

Configure script compilation with `vbi.rsp`

Use /r: to reference assemblies.
Use /imports: to import namespaces and XML namespaces.
For default settings, see vbi.rsp.
For more descriptions, run vbi with /? option.

#R Directive

The following code calls Newtonsoft.Json 13.0.3 stored in Windows NuGet package cache to serialize a number to JSON and prints the value in VB format.

#R "C:\Users\<your user name>\.nuget\packages\newtonsoft.json\13.0.3\lib\net8.0\Newtonsoft.Json.dll"
Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject(1)

? Directive

Prints a value in VB format. The following code prints vbCrLf or vbLf depends on which OS you're using.

? Environment.NewLine

Top-level code

You can use Dim, Sub and Function without wrapping them explicitly. The following code prints Fibonacci sequence without declaring a class or module.

Function Fibonacci(n As Integer) As Integer
    If n <= 1 Then
        Return n
    Else
        Return Fibonacci(n - 1) + Fibonacci(n - 2)
    End If
End Function

Sub PrintFibonacci(count As Integer)
    Console.WriteLine(String.Join(",",
        From i In Enumerable.Range(1, count)
        Select Fibonacci(i)))
End Sub

Dim count = 10
PrintFibonacci(count)

Known issues

Significant problems:

Imports doesn't work in interactive mode.
Await can't be used in top-level code.
.vbx files can't be run with the original version of Roslyn.

For more information, see https://github.com/Nukepayload2/VBScriptDotNet/issues

Nukepayload2/VBScriptDotNet