Is it possible? (Visual studio resources in a wpf or a windows forms program or even an asp.net application)

Question

I had this idea: create a program that simulates the visual studio to help people learn c#. It would be something like that "try for yourself" feature of w3schools.com

There would be a textbox that the user could put some code in it for example:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
        }
    }
}

but now there's the tricky part: if the user commited a synthax error for example, i'd like to show the error like the visual studio, or when the user clicks on a "verify" button, if the code is wrong, i'd get the same error as the visual studio would show up. Is it possible?

Answer 1

Thanks for the answers. I've found what i've been looking for. What i wanted to do, is to allow an user to input some code in a text box, and when he/she clicks on a "generate" button, the code would be compiled and an .exe would be generated. After some research, ive found this class:

CSharpCodeProvider codeProvider = new CSharpCodeProvider();

You can set some parameters to generate an .exe or a dll and you send a string as the code to be compiled. If it has errors, you can catch them by doing this:

 if (results.Errors.Count > 0)
{
                {
                    foreach (CompilerError CompErr in results.Errors)
                    {
                        txtErro.Text = txtErro.Text +
                            "Line number " + CompErr.Line +
                            ", Error Number: " + CompErr.ErrorNumber +
                            ", '" + CompErr.ErrorText + ";" +
                            Environment.NewLine + Environment.NewLine;
                    }
                }
}

I hope that this can be useful to the others as well. Thanks a lot!

Answer 2

I think it is possible but you have to use reflection. With that you can dynamically create C# code which you can compile runtime. It is however quite advanced but as far as I know it is possible.

The following link might be useful:

Generating DLL assembly dynamically at run time

What you really want is:

What are the benefits of Compiler as a Service

But afaik this is not available now. Also you do not get the debugging functionality. You can probably run a new instance of VS with debugging etc, but it might be a little overkill.