Using Visual Studio (Express) as a Script Editor proxy

Question

I'd like to:

• start a new instance of visual studio
• set up a project with a bunch of custom references
• create a single source code file (*.vb and *.cs both need to work)
• detect changes made to this file (i.e. when Save is used from VS)

This will hopefully allow me to provide my users with a good source code editor for when they write VB or C# 'scripts' in my app. All they should have to do is install VS (Express).

Is this possible? Where do I start? There's a lot of information out there about the VS API and SDK and it makes it very hard to find what I'm looking for.

Currently still writing code in VS 2008 for .NET 2.0, cannot upgrade to a .NET 4.0 for a while.

Answer 1

you can do this without the VS api; you can launch VS with the project/solution/source file as an argument (use devenv /? to see options) and have your app check the modified time of the file: when this time changes, it means the file was saved.