I'd like to host Javascript in my C# program. I would like to allow users to write custom Javascript code, and have my C# program run their functions, as well as allow the users to use my framework code.
Is it possible to do this? If so, how?
Edit: To be clear, I am not using ASP.NET for this project.
Spidermonkey .NET Is probably what you are looking for.
I'm not sure how developed it is. Buts its basically a port of Mozilla's Spidermonkey Javascript parser engine which I like a lot.
Or you can evaluate it directly
You can certainly run Javascript natively from C# - see this article for a starter. Having the Javascript access your framework could be tricker, though. Perhaps Script# could help?
you can also use a webbrowser control to host the javascript in a html document, to interact between the two you would make a COM visible class and set an instance of it to the ObjectForScripting property.
Any public members of the 'external' class are now accessible through window.external in javascript. Also, from the managed code side you can use the InvokeScript method of the document to call any javascript functions.
This way it is easy to pass complex objects between the two.
I used this idea quite a bit in this Google Earth Api application. http://fraserchapman.blogspot.com/2008/08/google-earth-plug-in-and-c.html
There are HTML components where you can embed JavaScript. For the other way the proper thing is an ASP.NET web service. Perhaps with a smart client you can combine both.
I'd highly recommend you use the Microsoft Dynamic Langauage Runtime (DLR). It's purpose in life is to facilitate scripting in a .Net environment. The DLR is not script specific so over time more script languages will be built on top of it but at the moment the ones I know about are IronRuby, IronPython and JScript.
The way to do this used to be the Windows Script Host, which permitted you to host either JSCript or VBScript.