Nikhil Kothari's Weblog : Script# Programming in the Large

Yesterday's PDC keynote featured a number of interesting products and technologies, such as Office 14 and Live Services, that today involve fairly large-scale (code size, team size and project length) Ajax development. The demos were just amazing - Kudos to the product teams!

Behind the scenes, on the engineering front, Script# provided the toolset and script authoring model. I've been working with both teams for quite a while now, and am really excited to be able to finally share these particular uses now that they are public (since to be honest, I was myself quite pleasantly surprised to see the model of compiling down to script scale up in this manner).

Live Mesh features an online desktop experience within the browser to enable remotely accessing files from any browser. The Live Framework exposes the underlying platform to .NET applications and script applications alike. The script framework portion of the SDK, like the UI, is based on Script#. The documentation for this framework on msdn was built from doc-comments in the originating c# code, which double up to enable script intellisense in Visual Studio.

Next in the keynote was a quick peek at what is to come in a web-ified Office 14. Some of the highlights included Excel, OneNote, and the Ribbon interface. These apps bring document sharing and collaboration to a whole new level. What is really cool is the live editing and continual sync'ing with the actual good-old, full-fidelity Office document file on the server or with another concurrent editing session in the full-blown desktop Office suite. These apps build on top of the ASP.NET Ajax framework, and were for the most part coded in c# and converted to javascript using script#.

The devs clearly recognized the value from using standard .NET tools and C# for engineering the thousands of lines of script and Ajax code that power these great consumer and developer experiences.

Posted on Wednesday, 10/29/2008 @ 2:34 PM | #Script#

Comments

Faraz Shah Khan

Posted on 10/29/2008 @ 10:33 PM

Indeed Live Mesh is one great thing specially when you actually see 2 distinct computers in 2 different countries synchs seemlessly. The way this Live Mesh helps me I am very happy with it. Here one suggestion I want to place I tried the remote access but I found it a little slow as compared to some other Web Remote Access tool. I believe it can pace up the speed if we have option to change the quality of picture as low/medium/high and color/black and white. It will really work. Since it tried to get the display in High Quality its little slow on my side. Pardon me if this option is there and I couldn't find it :)

thanks and best of luck.

dummy_customer

Posted on 10/30/2008 @ 12:56 AM

One question comes to mind though? Isn't Microsoft scared that the Office Web application can be more easily copied, because it's a Browser based JavaScript/Ajax application?

How do you intend to protect your intellectual property? Or do you think the current state of technology already allows competitors to build 'slick' Office Web Clones (and therefore don't care). And I emphasize slick, because a lot of Office Web Clones are just well..... 'sub-prime' :P

I think the industry needs an obfuscator for JavaScript!

Steve

Posted on 10/30/2008 @ 6:31 AM

I would really like to see you include jQuery - the syntax of jQuery is very easy to work with. (Especially after the announcement of it's inclusion into asp.net mvc - I take that as 'MS adoption' - lol)

Selectors, etc... are very easy to work with and the ubiquitous style of attaching to elements without cluttering the html is extremely powerful.

Some questions:
1. Any samples of using this with asp.net mvc ? how to build it with mvc, etc...

2. In many senario's I need ajax calls on 'lists' dynamically built at runtime with in place editing where I want to use javascript.

I'm having a hard to wrapping my head around how you would do this in Script# since the whole nature of this is dynamically attaching to elements at runtime, etc... ?

I haven't used asp.net webforms in over a year - primarily doing asp.net mvc or even Silverlight. I'd like to see the pdf documentation show how to use your Script# on non-webform applications.

Is this possible?

Great work

Nikhil Kothari

Posted on 10/30/2008 @ 1:15 PM

@dummy_customer - the reality is with today's complex Ajax apps, its really hard to replicate any product/site with just the script. Not only is it hard to extract a portion of a huge script easily to do anything meaningful, but it is just one component of the app. A lot of the interesting technology still remains on the server both in terms of code and operations in making the experience real.

@Steve - Thanks! I am thinking about jQuery ... was working on it, but haven't been able to focus on it for a few weeks.
My post on Ajax and MVC is a bit dated before any Ajax support was added (http://www.nikhilk.net/Ajax-MVC.aspx), but it used script# for the scripts.
Script# and ASP.NET Ajax both offer something called behaviors - which are encapsulations of script logic you can dynamically attach to elements either specific ones, or the results of a CSS query. Hope that serves as a pointer to look further.
Will look into updated documentation.

Nikhil Kothari

Posted on 11/1/2008 @ 7:43 PM

@BjartN - unit testing is still in the works. I'd really like to get it out soon - I need to work on a few different ends in terms of features and getting releases out before I have a more definitive ETA...

@Dave Townsend - could you tell me what specfic framework you're looking for? jQuery support is same as the unit testing answer above. Script# also supports asp.net ajax. Script# has its own framework as well, if you'd like (the Live Framework uses it).

Abhinav Vohra

Posted on 12/10/2008 @ 9:25 AM

Hi Nikhil
We've been using S# since 0.4.5 and have built our complete UI framework with it. Now we've been looking to develop our client code on non -windows environments using Mono 2.01 and monodevelop.

The IDE is able to read the sln and csproj files but I run into the following issue when I try to compile without mscorlib.

Any thoughts?

Abhi

Unhandled Exception: System.TypeLoadException: Could not load type 'System.Object' from assembly 'sscorlib, Version=0.5.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8fc0e3af5abcb6c4'.
at (wrapper managed-to-native) System.MonoType:GetMethodsByName (string,System.Reflection.BindingFlags,bool,System.Type)
at System.MonoType.GetMethods (BindingFlags bindingAttr) [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.MemberCache.AddMethods (BindingFlags bf, System.Type type) [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.MemberCache.AddMethods (System.Type type) [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.MemberCache..ctor (IMemberContainer container) [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.TypeHandle..ctor (System.Type type) [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.TypeHandle.GetTypeHandle (System.Type t) [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.TypeHandle.GetMemberCache (System.Type t) [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.TypeManager.LookupMemberCache (System.Type t) [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.MemberCache..ctor (System.Type baseType, IMemberContainer container) [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.TypeContainer.DoDefineMembers () [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.Class.DoDefineMembers () [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.TypeContainer.DefineMembers () [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.RootContext.PopulateTypes () [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.Driver.Compile () [0x00000]
at Mono.CSharp.Driver.Main (System.String[] args) [0x00000]
make[1]: *** [bin/FrameworkScripts.dll] Error 1

Erik Källén

Posted on 7/31/2009 @ 1:32 PM

Script# truly is an excellent piece of software. I'm using it to build a complex RIA, and it really brings development time down. What used to take half a day can now be done in 2 minutes with VS refactoring!

Also, it adds the possibility to have some of the code as shared source between server and client, truly awesome.

However, there are still things that could be improved. There are a few annoying bugs, and the lack of generics is a major drawback. When is the next release coming out? And how is it going with the open-sourcing of the project. I'd happily contribute as soon as that happens.

Brad Chase

Posted on 9/3/2009 @ 12:25 PM

I absolutely LOVE Script#, thank you very much Nikhil! I am hoping there will be another version.

There are some issues with the current version that if you dont know them might cause some headaches.

You cannot compare strings by using if( str1 == "test" ), is must be done with str1.CompareTo("test").

If you use explicitly create a field using private the field will not serialize correctly. So make sure to never use "private" and let it automatically declare as private.

There are problems with for and foreach statements and how they are translated, this caused some debug headaches for me, but once you figure out how they are translated no problem.

There are others but overall i am very happy with it. I wish there was a better way of debugging and I hope for generics to be introduced soon!

Again thanks Nikhil!

--Brad

Brad Chase

Posted on 9/10/2009 @ 7:26 PM

Well I have an extremely weird situation happening with the string compares. Im trying to write a JSON deserializer(to fit microsoft's format) and have been stuck on random String.CompareTo() and String == String comparer.

Sometimes one works and the other doesn't. Then after a few debug restarts they flip-flop and the other will work. In debug I will take the exact code and put a watch on it where it wrongly compares the strings and it still gives me the wrong answer. For instance I will put in "\"" == "\"" and it will come back false in the watch window.

So my question is, Is development still moving forward on this project? If not is there an opportunity to help on coding it? Or will this ever go open source?

Thanks,
Brad

Brad Chase

Posted on 9/15/2009 @ 12:06 PM

On setting properties, is ID a reserved keyword? For instance when I serialize a property and set it - it translates to object.set_propertyname. When I have a property named RecieveID, it's set is set_recieveID. But when my property is ID, it's set is set_id and not set_iD. I thought originally that all the sets just lowercased the first letter. But in the case of a property named ID it lowercases the whole word. Or is this a circumstance of a 2 letter word?

Thanks,
Brad

Script# Programming in the Large

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