Allow "Send References to F# Interactive" in C#/VB projects

[forki]

Visual Studio has a very helpful feature which allows you to right-click on the project references and "Send References to FSI". This will load all the references in the current FSI (F# Interactive) session and you are ready to run scripts which depend on these references.

This feature is used for interactive testing of modules. We often have .fsx script files in the project and run these interactively and play with / test our applications. This workflow is really helpful and different to running automated unittests.

The same interactive testing approach is possible with C# projects and works also very well. The only issue left is that we don't have the context menu "Send References to F# Interactive" in C# projects.

This is already reported and discussed in dotnet/fsharp#228 but people agreed that this nothing the F# community / Visual F# Team should decide on their own.

I'm asking this here (and not creating a uservoice) since I hope we can discuss pros and cons. An obvious cons is that "C# only" devs will then have a "weird" new context menu entry. But we could argue that this is a relatively small impact given the huge amount of stuff you can do in VS and in some sense it could be seen as "regularizing" the VS functionality across project types.

Since more and more people see value in adding .fsx files to C# projects I hope you seriously consider this.

[raymens]

I use this feature very often in F# projects. Sometimes I wanted to do the same with C# projects but had to do manual references which really slows it all down and is quite a bit of work. I very much would like this feature to be available to more project types, especially c#.

[njlittle]

+1 for this feature

[jakubka]

+1. This would be super useful

[Munksgaard]

+1. To avoid confusing "C# only" devs, it could just be an option that you enabled somewhere.