A quick guide to getting going with Roslyn

DaedTech - Getting Started on the Roslyn Journey

It’s not as though it’s new; Roslyn CTP was announced in the fall of 2011, and people have been able to play with it since then. Roslyn is a quietly ground-breaking concept — a set of compilers that exposes compiling, code modeling, refactoring, and analysis APIs. Oh, and it was recently announced that the tool would be open source meaning that all of you Monday morning quarterback language authors out there can take a crack at implementing multiple inheritance or whatever other language horrors you have in mind.

I have to say that I, personally, have little interest in modifying any of the language compilers (unless I went to work on a language team, which would actually be a blast, I think), but I’m very interested in the project itself. This strikes me as such an incredible, ground-breaking concept and I think a lot of people are just kind of looking at this as a curiosity for real language nerds and Microsoft fanboys. The essential value in this offering, to me, is the standardizing of code as data. I’ve written about this once before, and I think that gets lost in the shuffle when there’s talk about emitting IL at runtime and infinite loops of code generation and whatnot. Forget the idea of dispatching a service call to turn blobs of text into executables at runtime and let’s agree later to talk instead about the transformative notion of regarding source code as entity collections rather than instruction sheets, scripts, or recipes.

But first, let’s get going with Roslyn. I’m going to assume you’ve never heard of this before and I’m going to take you from that state of affairs to doing something interesting with it in this post. In subsequent/later posts, we’ll dive back into what I’m driving at philosophically in the intro to this post about code as data.

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My purpose here was to give you a path from “what’s this Roslyn thing anyway” to “wow, look at that, I can write a query against my own code.” Hopefully you’ve gotten that out of this, and hopefully you’ll go forth, tinker, and then you can come back and show me some cool tricks.

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A pretty short and sweet post on getting you started with the cool that is Roslyn, from someone outside the mothership...