New Post: engine.Evaluate in an event driven method

evolvedmicrobe's comment had me go back to the drawing board and start with a fresh console app to test some ideas. This works as expected:

                engine.Initialize();
                var e = engine.Evaluate("a<-0");
                NumericVector v1 = engine.GetSymbol("a").AsNumeric();
                Console.WriteLine("a = "+ v1[0].ToString());
                for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
                {
                    engine.Evaluate("a <- a + 1");
                    NumericVector v2 = engine.GetSymbol("a").AsNumeric();
                    Console.WriteLine("a + 1 = " + v2[0].ToString());
                    
                }
                Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit");
                Console.ReadKey();

... and by playing around with variable scope and declaration I can recreate the exceptions I saw yesterday ( C# null refs and R.NET parse exceptions). I'll take this knowledge and now go back to the initial project and try to fix it. Thanks for the hand holding!