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Was curious if anyone had estimated the effort it would take to utilize the file-based flavor of .NET (and it's support for loading projects and upcoming support for including other .cs files) within the community-driven effort for replacing dotnet interactive]
Some of what you can do with file-based apps (loading packages, directly running .cs files) was already supported, including via dotnet-repl and the #!import magic. But yeah adding in full support for that syntax would be nice. I doubt it's a huge effort though there might be devils in the details.
We had discussed an alternative syntax for NuGet packages and went with #r "nuget:PackageName" only because it was already in the process of being implemented for F#. But from a tooling support perspective (e.g. completions), the file-based apps syntax is (I think) nicer.
Onionhammer — 04.05.2026 23:41
I think consistency is nicest of all
if there's already a way to do it, even if it looks slightly less appealing, do it that way
my main concern is loading projects (csproj) not packages or .cs files.
thats one thing file-based apps have on DNI
That was a long-requested feature.
It should be pretty doable.
if there's already a way to do it, even if it looks slightly less appealing, do it that way
Supporting both models is probably fairly simple as well.
This could be an additive change, and the documentation for file-based apps is likely to be more widely available, so it might be a better pit of success for newer users.
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Was curious if anyone had estimated the effort it would take to utilize the file-based flavor of .NET (and it's support for loading projects and upcoming support for including other .cs files) within the community-driven effort for replacing dotnet interactive]
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