14.3. Compiling and using assemblies at runtime

The code we wrote earlier to wrap native functions for WindowUtils was brief, but having to maintain a separate Visual Studio project and recompile and then copy assemblies across every time we changed the code could be annoying. We can avoid this, and actually eliminate the need to even save binary assemblies at all, by compiling straight from source code into memory!

.NET provides access to the compiler infrastructure, through the System.CodeDom.Compiler namespace^[19] in conjunction with an appropriate code provider. Accessing this programmatically from IronPython is straightforward once you know the magic invocations.

^[19] See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.codedom.compiler.aspx.