---
title: "how do you make your .NET application scriptable?"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/2/18/how-do-you-make-your-net-application-scriptable.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/2/18/how-do-you-make-your-net-application-scriptable.html"
published: "2003-02-18T14:11:00"
updated: "2003-02-18T14:11:00"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "One of the last big projects i have done in VB 6.0 was creating an inhouse system that was also totally scriptable, using MS Script control. the user could react to ecents raised by the aplication, and interact and…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# how do you make your .NET application scriptable?

By Roy Osherove February 18, 2003

**Historical article** · Originally published February 18, 2003; technical details may be outdated.

One of the last big projects i have done in **VB 6.0** was creating an inhouse system that was also totally scriptable, using MS Script control. the user could react to ecents raised by the aplication, and interact and write whole scripts using it's rich object model. it was quite powerful. It used the very cool and free [CodeSense syntax editor control](http://www.ticz.com/homes/users/nlewis/), and was my pride and joy.

The question arises whether this possibility remains in managed languages. What is the way to develop scriptable applications using **C#?** are there any scripting libraries? or perhaps i should investigate the whole **reflection** or **compilerServices** namespaces..

My guess is it is probably harder to implement such functionality then it was using MSSCRIPT, although not impossible. I think that there is probably more internal support for this and one can do much more then VBScript style scripting, one can do full managed scripting (probably) with type checking and everything. How to do this without building your own little C# compiler still remains to be seen for me. will keep you updated as to developments...

Update:

_Title: Check out this article
Name:_ [**_Jason_**](http://www.dotnetweblogs.com/jtucker)_
Posted Date: 2/18/2003 10:02 AM
__There was an article in the August issue of MSDN Mag, actually written by Chris Sells.. check it out here.

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/08/VisualStudioforApplications/default.aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/08/VisualStudioforApplications/default.aspx)_

_I am diving in as we speak! thanks!_


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

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### Contact

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### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/