The so called “Roslyn” project from Microsoft has been finally released with this early CTP. What is “Roslyn”? It’s an attempt to make the internals of a C# or VB compiler exposed. The usual way we think about a compiler is as a black box – some input goes in – some output comes out. During the compilation process, the compiler builds various tables and gathers a lot of information on the input. After the output is generated, the compiler throws everything away. That’s really too bad.

In today’s world of sophisticated tools, with intellisense and refactoring, it would be really nice to tap in to that compiler knowledge without the need of creating our own C# or VB parsers. Although non-Microsoft tools had to do that (e.g. ReSharper), it would be better to get a first hand look at what the compiler knows. This is exactly what Roslyn is about. Tapping the internal knowledge of the compiler.

This idea is pretty exciting, as it opens up a lot of opportunities to enhance development tools and runtime behavior as well, such as Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) features.

The CTP can be downloaded here. More information can be found on the Roslyn page on MSDN.