Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Demystify Roslyn

Today I watched the video of //build/ C# 5.0, VB 11, Visual studio 2011 New Features from Anders Hejlsberg - Windows Runtime support, Asychronous support, Call Information attributes, Roslyn project, Script engine etc.  Mostly interested to me is that it demystify what Roslyn can do. It is indeed very cool.

The foundation of this Roslyn is a new C# compiler, written in C# (and a new VB compiler written in VB too, see the VB Team blog for details). This compiler is written as a library that exposes a rich public API. Next up is a new language service written purely using that public API and exposing its own extensibility points to allow 3rd parties to do amazing things inside Visual Studio with that language understanding.

Traditionally, compilers are black boxes -- source code goes in one end, and object files or assemblies come out the other end. The Microsoft “Roslyn” community preview changes that model by opening up the VB and C# compilers.

Compilers in “Roslyn” provide APIs to allow tools and end-users to share in the wealth of information the compilers have about code. The Microsoft "Roslyn" CTP previews the new language object models for code generation, analysis, and refactoring, and the upcoming support for scripting and interactive use of C# and Visual Basic.

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