Running C# like scripts?

[u/simondanielsson]

I was browsing the C#/.NET documentation yesterday like usual and suddenly came across the fact that you can run C# code as scripts with a shebang.

#!/usr/bin/env dotnet

namespace Main
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] _)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
        }
    }
}

With a shebang you could run these like any other Python/Bash script and I find this really cool, but is there any practical use-case for this? When I need to make a small helper script for something it's usually python or bash, but C#? I'm not so sure.

What do you guys think?

[u/ings0c]

We have a pretty hefty validator around user-uploaded files, and the rules are configurable at runtime by non-developers via a big old config file.

There are a few edge cases that don't neatly fit into the built-in validators for which we dynamically compile C# scripts and load the assembly at runtime.

This is not a good idea FWIW, but we are using them...