I know I have a few friends and coworkers that prefer to have all the scripting done in their language of choice, C#. Before .NET 4.6+ their best bet for automating DevOps tasks in a Windows based infrastructure was, for the most part, PowerShell.
But, if you’re already familiar with the C# syntax and basic namespaces, why can’t you continue to use your favorite language to write scripts?
Well, now you can.
Thanks to the Roslyn compiler project, you can now use the nuget package to use the Scripting API.
The Scripting API, as of today, requires the .NET Framework Desktop 4.6 as a minimum, with the .NET Core this Scripting API should now be cross-platform. I haven’t tried it yet, but will do in a very near future and will blog about my experience using this Scripting API on CentOS.
Some directives that are present in PowerShell might not be present yet on the Scripting API (I’m thinking cd, ls etc), but it is worth the try.
You can also script away using C# in a browser, any browser… And we now have a new file extension for C# scripts => .csx files.
C# Scripting and csx file projects are highly used in creating Bot services hosted on Azure using the RESTful APIs provided by Azure.
Happy coding and I hope you enjoyed the good news of C# Scripting.
Code away!