dotnet

The primary goal of {dotnet} is to provide a {knitr} engine for the C# and F# languages and the .NET Framework. Internally, it accomplishes via an R6-based interface for the dotnet command line interface for building .NET applications. See ?DotNetApp for details.

Not to be confused with:

• {rDotNet} R package which is a “low-level interface to ‘.NET’ virtual machine” and which “can create ‘.NET’ objects, call methods, get or set properties, call static functions, etc.”
• R.NET NuGet package which “enables the .NET Framework to interoperate with the R statistical language in the same process”

Notice: this package is released as-is. I don’t know that I’ll be able to maintain it all that much. Like, the original motivation for this package was wanting to write a blog post about Bayesian inference and probabilistic programming with Infer.NET in R Markdown for my {blogdown}-based site. Which is to say it was a fun, goofy exercise in learning how to make a custom knitr engine. Also, “C#/F# in R Markdown in blogdown-based websites” is a VERY obscure use-case. Let me know on Twitter if you use this package. (I’m bearloga on there.)

It is licensed under BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License.

Installation

To start rendering R Markdown documents with dotnet engine chunks, you need to be able to build .NET apps on your system. Download and install the .NET SDK. If you can run dotnet in Terminal without problems, you’re set.

remotes::install_github("bearloga/dotnet")

Usage

First, the dotnet engine must be registered with knitr:

dotnet::register_engine()

Once registered with knitr, we use the dotnet engine to run programs written in C#:

```{dotnet}
using System;
```

The following examples are dotnet-using chunks in this README’s source Rmd document.

using System;

class Program {
  static void Main(string[] args) {
    Console.WriteLine("Hello from C# and R Markdown!");
  }
}
#> Hello from C# and R Markdown!

…and programs written in F#, by specifying engine.opts = list(language = 'F#') in the chunk options:

open System

[<EntryPoint>]
let main argv =
    printfn "Hello from F# and R Markdown!"
    0 // return an integer exit code
#> Hello from F# and R Markdown!

Programs with source code split across multiple chunks are supported. Refer to the multi-chunk programs vignette for reference.

Programs with dependencies on NuGet packages can add those via engine.opts. For example:

```{dotnet, engine.opts = list(add_packages = c('Microsoft.ML.Probabilistic.Compiler'))}
using System;
using Microsoft.ML.Probabilistic.Models;
```

This is demonstrated in the “Inference on two coins with Infer.NET” vignette.

Refer to ?register_engine for more information about the dotnet knitr engine..