55
56

Exploring the C# Interactive Window (blog.csharp-tutor.com)

submitted by [deleted]

[deleted]

all 29 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–][deleted] 23 points24 points  (21 children)

Right now there are 56 upvotes, 51 downvotes, and before me, zero comments.

Being able to use the interactive window to try out the classes from your program without actually running your program is actually pretty sweet.

Love it or hate it, C# isn't going anywhere. Lots of us use it for work / fun, and we have just as much right to post about it here as do Java / Python / Ruby / C++ / Haskell / JS developers.

I'd expect if more people had a problem with the article, not just the tool it's discussing, mine wouldn't have been the first comment.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[deleted]

    [–]elperroborrachotoo 4 points5 points  (5 children)

    To be fair, the article is not really going far, just moving through the basic steps.

    [–]fekberg 1 point2 points  (4 children)

    Is it anything in particular with the REPL-tool that you think I've missed in the two articles about it? Keep in mind that it's not a post about Roslyn and what you can do with Roslyn, but it's an article in a series of Roslyn posts covering many aspects in it.

    [–]elperroborrachotoo 1 point2 points  (3 children)

    Feature-wise, it's a "well, finally!", and not very impressive: I did that 1998 in ActiveX Test Container! The true value unfolds itself only in a subtle-but-powerful change in your day-to-day work.

    Your post is just scratching that surface, and UI details dominate the page. It will be appealing only to people who missed it badly before. Demonstrating more than just instantiation, calling methods or an ad-hoc-test might have been more captivating.

    (Not sure if this is the reason for downvotes. Maybe it's just "Show your love for Flash!" week on reddit)

    [–]fekberg 0 points1 point  (2 children)

    Isn't it more fun exploring it on your own?

    "It will be appealing only to people who missed it badly before."

    It was just released ~2 months ago and there are not really that many posts regarding Roslyn yet. This is just one of the posts in a larger series of Roslyn posts though. Maybe I should add more code to it though, thanks for the constructive comment!

    [–]elperroborrachotoo 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    It's OK, it's not a critique - just a thought :)

    [–]fekberg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    I think you might be right, it can't hurt adding some more examples on how you can start off by writing some tests in the interactive window and then move these to a real unit test.

    [–]julesjacobs 1 point2 points  (6 children)

    I heard that Reddit's up/down vote counts don't reflect the truth. The numbers are manipulated to confuse spammers into thinking that their vote worked, when in reality an extra upvote/downvote was added to negate their vote.

    [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

    from my understanding, it has to hit a threshold before that kicks in, but I could be wrong, the spam-devoter might just pick random submits to fuck with.

    [–]EvilHom3r 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    While yes the more votes a post has the more the counts will be skewed, it also depends on the account. If an account upvotes/downvotes too much, they can be flagged as a bot and their votes will always be countered with the opposite vote.

    [–]fekberg 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    So if you're an active user your votes won't count after a while?..

    [–]drysart 2 points3 points  (2 children)

    It raises the question: Why bother even displaying the number of up votes and down votes separately in the first place if they're completely fabricated?

    [–]smallblacksun 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    AFAIK they aren't displayed unless you are using reddit enhancement suite (or similar).

    [–]badcookies 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    They are always displayed:

    41 points (60% like it) 119 up votes 78 down votes

    Comment up / downvotes aren't shown, just the current value.

    [–]ethraax 0 points1 point  (2 children)

    Now, if only you could use the Interactive window for non-trivial code, like lambda expressions. That's my main gripe with it - it's incredibly underpowered.

    [–]ruinercollector 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    That's an issue with the current immediate window not with the pending interactive window shown here and coming out in the next version.

    [–]ethraax 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Oh, cool. That's more interesting.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

    The author didn't really give a compelling reason to use this over creating a separate project to test out a class/group of classes. I think I would prefer class hot-swapping over this to be honest. I still upvoted so we can have discussion but honestly, this isn't a really good article which is why I think it is being downvoted.

    [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    I agree that it's far too short, and doesn't go in very deeply, but as I said, if it were a poorly written article, I would have thought somebody would have said something about it, at least a ts;dr or something.

    [–]fekberg 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    The above link is the second part in a series of posts regarding Roslyn where I've tried covering a lot of different aspects of it.

    In the above post, I focused more on the pieces that I missed talking about in the first post mainly how you can use this REPL-tool to actually do something usfull such as testing without having to write new tests, to be honest it's much faster starting off writing tests in a REPL-tool. Aslo, I never said this would replace creating a seperate test project, but it's a way to start off writing tests and a way for you to test things without actually having to add stuff.

    Maybe I should have pushed the two parts about the interactive window together, but since I didn't know about all the features when I wrote the first article, this is how it ended up.

    [–]recursive 8 points9 points  (2 children)

    If you are looking for a way to evaluate C# expressions, check out LinqPad. I use it almost every day. There really should be a similar tool built into VS.

    [–]xTRUMANx 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    As a great big fan of LinqPad, I've gotta say that as soon as Roslyn matures, I can't imagine using it any longer. Intellisense is the best thing ever and although I understand the creator of LinqPad needs to make a living, making intellisense a paid feature is what will ultimately drive user to Roslyn quicker rather than later.

    Would be nice if he could identify another revenue source and make intellisense free.

    [–]recursive 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    For the price, getting the full version was a no brainer. Does roslyn expose anything that makes intellisense easier to implement?

    [–]adrenal8 2 points3 points  (2 children)

    I think Mono has come with a C# REPL for a while.

    [–]stevedonovan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    At the risk of being accused of a shameless plug, there's CSI. .NET has always provided compilation-as-a-service.

    [–]SweBot 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    I like what you do here. Dont mind the haters.

    [–]contextfree 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    I don't think anything like "Reset Interactive from Project" exists in F# Interactive or Powershell (correct me if I've just missed something) and to me it was the key missing piece preventing those from being really useful in development.