Features | xsharper.com

XSharper is free, open source, redistributable, and works without any installation so scripts can be included into setup of commercial products, or may be run w/o administrative rights.

Easy to learn, read and remember. I don't write scripts very often and tend to forget syntax details of a specific language, let alone functionality of a framework, after not using it for a couple of weeks. It's self documenting too, invoking XSharper /? produces help not only about XSharper, but also about other classes in .NET framework
.NET framework is used as standard library
Minimum required .NET framework is .NET 2.0 ( .NET 1.0 is too limiting, .NET 3.5+ is not always installed on the XP/Windows 2003/Vista machines ).
It's very easy to insert C# code snippets into a script, and interleave it with XML actions
The script engine is simple, and it is easy to debug the script and the engine simultaneously with Visual Studio.
IntelliSense and syntax highlighting works in Visual Studio from day one

The language is suited for writing Windows console applications. Not web servers, not multithreaded GUI monsters, not games, but simple console applications.
There is a simple yet reliable mechanism to define and parse command line parameters. And it prints help automatically too, and does it nicely.
In XSharper it's easy to embed "data islands" into the script in XML, CSV, plain text and other formats.
It is easy to do things that console applications often do: copy/delete/move files from place to place, create and extract .ZIP archives, download files from web servers, run SQL statements. Much easier than writing code in C#.
Same things can be written in C# or XML, although XML is often more easily readable for sequential tasks like batch files
Standard try/catch/finally error handling
There is even a small package manager built-in, that can be used to upgrade software modules and SQL databases using a central repository

It is easy to create XSharper script programmatically
It is a simple, single step process to produce .CS source or .EXE files out of scripts to improve performance and simplify deployment. Who needs XCOPY deployment, if a single EXE can do everything?
It is possible to decompile produced executables into something close to the original script, to handle cases when the original script is lost or unavailable.

XSharper can execute scripts from files, command line, .config files, standard input, URLs
It's very easy to embed XSharper code into any application. Needs just a single assembly reference and a few lines of wrapper code.
XSharper scripts can be run in another application domain (or even process), communicating back through remoting
Ctrl+C is handled automatically, and script has a chance to shut down gracefully with deleting any temporary files.
Supports Vista UAC, and escalated console application gets the original console

XSharper.Core library can be used as an assembly, or source code files comprising the assembly may be extracted and reused independently
Library includes, in no particular order:
- a general purpose and simple expression parser and evaluator with C#-like syntax
- a flexible XML serialization library for .NET 2.0, that does not require serialization code to be compiled, with automatic XSD schema generator
- text templates expansion
- simplified C# compiler invocation classes, making compilation of custom C# code with multiple references and requirements much easier
- table output with column auto formatting
- command-line parsing and help generation
- parsing and creating CSV files
- converting binary to hex and vice versa
- dumping arbitrary object to text for debugging & logging purposes
- simplified registry access, with support for x64 and x32 versions of registry
- easy conversions between types (useful for parsing user input)
- many other utility classes and functions, from text parsing to reflection acceleration through caching

And this is just the beginning.