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Roslyn September 2012 CTP is now available

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I am super excited to announce that we have just released a third "Community Technology Preview" of Roslyn. Roslyn, in case you have not heard, is the code name for the project I work on; we are re-architecting the C# and VB compilers so that they are no longer "black boxes" where code goes in, a miracle happens, and then IL comes out. Rather, the box is now glass and you can use the lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis engines that we write for your own purposes.

We have implemented semantic analysis of most of the C# and VB language features now. On the C# side we are through most of the C# 3 features; we still lack "dynamic" from C# 4 and "await" from the recently-released C# 5. We've also made many changes (hopefully all improvements) to the APIs. For a complete list of the updates, to access the Roslyn question-and-answer forum, or to download it and try it for yourself, go to msdn.com/roslyn.

We would love to get your feedback on the forum or on connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio about what you do and do not like about the APIs; that's why we do these technology previews so often. (Please leave feedback on the forum rather than as a comment to this blog; we have a team of program managers who read the forums.) I hope you enjoy this latest CTP; we enjoyed building it.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2012
    Hi Eric I love the Roslyn idea, and I'm sure that will be a big steep forward for .Net and VS. Said that I always questioned in MS forums about why Visual Studio generate intermediate info and why that can't be avoided. For example if you have 5 projects in a solution, all of winforms, all the resx are transformed in resources, written to disk, later linked to the .dll of each project, copied all around in obj and bin folders, I think that memory must be used as intermediate storage for that. Roslyn will make all that intermediate stuff faster ? avoiding to open compiler, read files, generate all objs, link all up in the dll, and the next project read all the info from dll to start compilation again. Roslyn will make inter process compiling a smart process ? Thanks for your explanation, keep in the good work Marcos www.filehelpers.com

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2012
    Great! I'm looking forward to the final release of Roslyn, when hopefully it will be integrated fully into VS. I really hope the VS team is able to leverage Roslyn to allow writing lambdas in the watch/immediate windows. Debugging without the benefit of LINQ is terrible!

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2012
    I'm curious as well like Marcos. Why should it have been written to disk, when it can be actually done in memory? I believe the process still can get optimized better.

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2012
    @Marcos, Max: I guess the intermediate files are written to disk so compiling a large project doesn't use so much memory every other process on the system starves.

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2012
    Downloading it now! Sounds excellent.

  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2012
    blogs.msdn.com/.../visualstudio is NOT a valid link to connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio correct is: connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio

  • Anonymous
    October 04, 2012
    I wonder if C# will ever allow to intercept the parser pipeline to customize the AST generation...