Scripting in CF.NET...

[Rasmus Kromann-Larsen]

Hey,

I'm currently developing an application that is used for surveys on
PDAs and have been messing around with the compact framework for a few
years now. My current application reads all it's survey related
information from an XML file, but due to the ever increasing feature
requirements posed on all software these days, I wish to implement some
kind of scripting for my surveys, actually I've been searching for a
solution for this for quite some time now.

My current implementation uses my own XML scripting based on actual XML
tags and so forth, but it's very tedious to write and even worse to
expand, since it basically consists of writing wrappers for simple C#
code and spending most of the time doing the actual parsing of the
script XML (which can get hairy in a scripting language, believe me ;-)

So what I have I researched?

1) First thought was JScript of VBScript, I had hoped support had come
for this in 2.0, but nope, still nothing from MS :-( Also, the
Microsoft.Vsa namespace is not available, so no luck.

2) I thought of making actual C# scripting using the CodeDom and
CodeDom.Compiler namespaces, but these seem limited to only one class
that I can't use for anything like this in 2.0.

3) Possibility of 3rd party scripting, I found something called
paxScript, they claim it works in the compact framework, but I havn't
tried it yet, I think this might be my last resort if all other things
fail.

4) The solution I'm leaning towards at the moment consists of
implementing option 2, but compiling the code on a desktop machine and
supplying it in compiled form in an additional file for each XML file.
Since the PDA's get set up from an application that I have control
over, it shouldn't be much problem to ensure that the newest version
would be on the PDA, but the solution significantly reduces the ability
to change scripts of a survey "in the field".

Am I the only person who got this crazy idea to script my CF.NET
applications, I hope there's some alternative I've missed, so I turn to
you guys, anyone have any experience with anything or any crazy ideas
that I might use? :-)

Thanks,
- Rasmus.

[jonfroehlich]

I'm in almost the exact same situation. I would like to run JScript or
VBScript in my .NET CF 2.0 application. Can anyone help Rasmus and I?

[jonfroehlich]

Just in case others are interested, I've recently started porting
Simkin to C#. Simkin is an embeddable scripting language that can
interact with class objects during runtime. See
http://csharponphone.blogspot.com/2006/05/simkin-or-simkincs-if-you-will.html.
The hope is to run this on .NET Compact Framework.