Boo web console

Here's another embeddable web console: a Boo interpreter. You enter some code, hit the Execute button and it compiles and runs the code. You get access to all of the assemblies in your app.

I use this to run short ad-hoc "queries" against a running web app, like:

• Is this thing in the cache?
  

  print (context.Cache["pepe"] == null)

• Do I have all httpmodules correctly registered?
  

  import System.Web
  for s in context.ApplicationInstance.Container.ResolveAll(typeof(IHttpModule)):
    print s

• Checking performance counters:
  

  import System.Diagnostics
  pc = PerformanceCounterCategory("ASP.NET")
  for counter in pc.GetCounters():
    print counter.CounterName, counter.NextValue()

• Or even running some NHibernate query (although I'd prefer using the NHibernate web console):
  

  import NHibernate 
  sf = context.ApplicationInstance.Container.Resolve(typeof(ISessionFactory)) 
  using s = sf.OpenSession(): 
    users = s.CreateQuery("from User order by newid()").SetMaxResults(5).List()
    for u in users: 
      print u.Id 

Why Boo? Because it's pretty much the perfect .net scripting language to embed: small (this console with boo merged in is about 1.9MB), type inference, duck typing, low-ceremony syntax.

Setup:

• Put BooWebConsole.dll in your app's bin directory
• Add it to your web.config's <httpHandlers> section:
  

  <add verb="*" path="boo/*" validate="false" type="BooWebConsole.ControllerFactory, BooWebConsole"/>

• Visit /boo/index.ashx

Notes:

• Unlike booish, this console is stateless. Each http request creates a new interpreter, it doesn't remember anything you executed in previous requests.
• Since the code is compiled and run within the main AppDomain, this will leak memory. Not a big deal in a dev environment though. But putting this in a production site is pretty much suicidal.
• In case it isn't obvious: this is not meant to replace proper testing.

Code is here.

UPDATE: it's now also available on NuGet