Onward and UpwardKeith Ward, Editor in Chief, Visual Studio Magazine
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New Update of 'Roslyn' CTP Available
An update of the "Roslyn" Community Technology Preview (CTP) has been released, Microsoft announced.
The September CTP features a host of new language features and a number of API changes. Microsoft warns that there are "known issues" with the CTP, and that only a subset of the C# and VB languages are included. The APIs that have been updated include the Compiler, Services and Editor Services APIs.
This is the third revision of the compiler-as-a-service project; it was previously updated in June, and was first released publicly to developers in October 2011.
Roslyn is a project to rewrite the C# and VB compilers in those languages; currently, they're written in C++. At the same time, the compiler is "opened up," instead of being a closed system, as in the past. As Visual Studio Magazine contributing editor Joe Kunk recently wrote, "Roslyn exposes information regarding source code parsing (what elements are present in code), semantic analysis (what they mean), binding (how they relate to each other), and IL emitting (executable code)."
VB developers may be disappointed to learn that the September CTP still doesn't support the "Interactive window", which is a popup window that allows immediate evaluation and testing of code snippets. Microsoft says, however, that VB support is coming in a future release.
Note that there are several requirements for running Roslyn. The most important is that the September CTP must be run on Visual Studio 2012; it won't work on Visual Studio 2010 or earlier. The supported operating systems are Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012.
Microsoft also states that the June CTP doesn't need to be un-installed before installing the September CTP.
Posted by Keith Ward on 09/19/2012