I have been really loving the Sublime Text editor lately. It’s quick, featureful, and extensible. I created a plugin that will build and run C# snippets from inside the editor.

I write a lot of C#, and I often find myself wanting to check the behavior of a certain method or operator. My go-to tool for this has been SnippetCompiler, but now I’m trying to eliminate as many reasons for leaving my editor as possible. So, I created a plugin for Sublime Text that is inspired by SnippetCompiler - it takes the selected text and shoves it inside the main routine of a simple C# console app, builds it, and runs it. You can customize the “usings” and the boilerplate code auto-inserted at the end of the Main routine (currently prints a short message and reads a key).

You can find the plugin on GitHub. Details follow.

Enter the CSharpreter Sublime Text plugin

CSharpreter compiles and executes fragments of C# code. The currently-selected text (or entire contents of the view, if no text is selected) is injected into the body of the Main routine of a C# console application. MSBuild is invoked and the executable is run in a shell window. This plugin has only been tested on Windows, but may be compatible with Mono’s XBuild.

With the default settings, your code will be injected into a program defined as follows:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

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

class Program
{ 
  static void Main(string[] args)
  {
    // YOUR TEXT HERE
    
    Console.WriteLine();
    Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit...");
    Console.ReadKey();
  }
}

Commands

• CSharpreter: Interpret - Execute the currently-selected text, or with no selected text, the entire contents of the view.
• CSharpreter: Cleanup - Delete the %temp%\CSharpreter folder, where temporary source and binaries are written.

Settings

In the CSharpreter package folder, edit c_sharpreter.sublime-settings file to modify the defaults.

• msbuild_path - Path to the MSBuild executable
• default_usings - List of namespaces to inject at the top of the source file.
• main_end - List of statements to inject at the end of the Main method.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

{
  "msbuild_path": "C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v4.0.30319/MSBuild.exe",
  "default_usings":
  [
      "System", "System.Collections.Generic", "System.Linq"
  ],
  "main_end":
  [
      "Console.WriteLine();",
      "Console.WriteLine(\"Press any key to exit...\");",
      "Console.ReadKey();"
  ]
}

Installation

Clone this repository into your Sublime Text packages folder.

Windows 7 / Vista and above

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 2\Packages

Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Sublime Text 2\Packages