I recently heard out about some interesting tools from Blue Reference. I haven’t had a chance to try them out yet, but they look promising.

Sweave has received a fair amount of attention with regard to reproducibility because it lets you embed R code in LaTeX. Code stays with the presentation document, reducing the chance of error and increasing transparency. However, the number of people who use R and LaTeX is small, and asking people to learn these two packages before they can reproducible research is not going to fly. The number of people who use C# and Microsoft Word is orders of magnitude larger than the number of folks who use R and LaTeX.

It looks like Blue Reference’s product Inference for .NET lets .NET programmers do the kinds of things Sweave lets R programmers do, embedding .NET code in Microsoft Office documents. The also make a product Inference for MATLAB for embedding MATLAB code in Office documents.

Python developers who don’t think of themselves as .NET developers might want to use Inference for .NET to embed Python code in Word documents via Iron Python. Ruby developers might want to use Iron Ruby similarly.