Visual Studio add-in to quickly test a code snippet

Question

One thing I really love about languages such as Python is that if you have a piece of code you'd like to try out, you can just open the interactive shell and do it in seconds.

Is there a Visual Studio add-in that does the same for C#?

Basically what I'm looking for is something that opens up a window or tab with a text editor (preferably with code completion, because VS does it so nicely) and a button that runs the code and displays the output. Extra points for convenience features such as displaying complex output in a user-friendly way (think Firebug's console.log), automatically referencing all the assemblies the current project references, etc.

I tried googling for a while, but either I fail at coming up with good keywords, or no-one has made an add-in like this. If there really is none, I'm considering making one myself.

Answer 1

I don't know about an add-in for VS but anytime I want to try something quickly (and don't want to fire up VS and create a console app) I use Snippet Compiler. It gets the job done as far as quickly testing methods and what not. I usually use it for things like testing a regex or trying out random datetime formatters. You can add references to other assemblies and it does provide some degree of intellisense.

Answer 2

I have a test.vcproj project sitting around with a test.cpp file which I paste code into. It's the best I could come up with.

Answer 3

LinqPad will execute C# snippets as well as LINQ. Nice except that autocompletion is not included in the free version. Of course you can write statements in VS with autocompletion, then copy/paste them into Linqpad.