[Mono-vb] VsaEngine implementation.

[Bernie Solomon]

Some information about what this is (well how to use it) can be found at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnclinic/html/scripting06112001.asp

and

http://www.develop.com/conferences/conferencedotnet/materials/N0.pdf

I'm interested in the license change idea as this avoids invoking the
command line as a separate process and interpreting the results, handling
the temporary assembly etc which I have been thinking of trying - though not
necessarily via the IVsa interfaces - but not done - I assume this would be
OK within the current licensing (i.e. like xsp).

Bernie

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anony Mous" <Anon21h@yahoo.co.uk>
To: <cesar@ciencias.unam.mx>
Cc: <mono-vb@lists.ximian.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 4:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Mono-vb] VsaEngine implementation.


>
>
> César López Natarén wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 15:30, Anony Mous wrote:
> >
> >>Hi César,
> >
> >
> > Hi!
> >
> >
> >>What exactly is a VsaEngine? I have looked around the net and it seems
> >>to point to something in the Longhorn SDK, which is currently incomplete
> >>and has little info on the subject. Can you expand on this a little
> >>please?
> >
> >
> > The VsaEngine, which comes from "Visual Studio for Applications",
> > is the mechanism that offer scripting capabilities to .Net (although it
existed before .Net too).
>
> Oh, I was familiar with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) I had no
> idea there was a VSA too! So what exactly makes up VSA? I know that MS
> Office apps for example, all embed VBA but I would hardly call the IDE
> they provide (which is mainly made up of just the editor and code
> browser) a "Visual Studio", especially since they all lack a forms
> engine. So is VSA just a set of  libraries, an IDE or both?
>
> > They way VSA works is:
> >
> > 1) We have a host, our application. The host implements a interface,
IVsaSite.
> > 2) We have scriting execution machine (the VsaEngine), which implements
the interface IVsaEngine.
> >
> > and communication is passed through the methods implementations from
those interfaces.
> >
> > And basically what the VsaEngine does is, take a source file or an
assembly and compiles/execute it.
>
> This sounds like the Active Scripting architecture used in things like
> WSH (Windows Scripting Host) and Internet Explorer. Is VSA the next
> evolution of this for .NET, allowing you to embed the CLR say like the
> way IIS does in order to provide ASP.NET functionality?
>
> >>From what I've been able to see that the JScript VsaEngine does is:
taking care of the
> > runtime supprt for assemblies generated by jsc. Basically, takes care of
the global
> > environment (types, functions, prototypes which are available) and the
differents environments created
> > on the course of the program execution.
> >
> > The code used for IVsaSite and IVsaEngine, is not difficult, I already
have some
> > chunks written at mcs/class/Microsoft.JScript/Microsoft.JScript/Vsa*.cs
> > but the one for environments, is a little strange, also I have not found
docs.
> >
> > I think lot's of code can be shared in this one, and also some
discussion will help us understand
> > this thing.
>
> Indeed. It all seems pretty secretive stuff at the moment which is
> worrying because either it is a new technology and we should be careful
> about trying to implement it before specifications for it mature, or MS
> wants to keep it proprietary which will mean that there will be no
> publicised specs at all hence making implementation difficult or
impossible.
> All in all, keep pursuing the issue since I imagine that once we have it
> figured out for JScript (or is it called J# nowadays?) we can reuse it
> to make a VBScript.Net based on the current mbas code.
>
> > César
>
> Thanks for the info César,
> Eric.
>
>
>
>
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