Microsoft Releases Preview of its Project Roslyn

On Wednesday, Microsoft rolled out the community technology preview of Project Roslyn, a new type of compiler which was first debuted at BUILD earlier this year, the company executive overseeing the C# programming language announced.

"This project is about revising what compilers do," said Anders Hejlsberg in a talk at Microsoft's Build conference. "[It] is about opening the compiler and making all that information available so [the developer] can harness all of this knowledge," he said.

Based on the Mono Project, Roslyn is designed to be a more open compiler that allows developers access and utilize the data that it is generating on the Visual Basic and C# code it is compiling. It resembles a model developed by Miguel de Icaza's Mono Project, in which the information the compiler generates about a program can be reused as a library.

Right now, Roslyn isn't a standalone product, this CTP is an extension for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 that provides a look at the new language object models for code generation, analysis, and refactoring, as well as the upcoming support for scripting and interactive use of C# and Visual Basic.

Developers could also use the output of such software to do tasks like refactor or reorganise their code more easily, to add C# and Visual Basic functionality to programs written in other languages. It also adds dynamic typing to the statically typed C# and Visual Basic, allowing developers to add objects and new variables to a program on the fly.

Michael Wolf, who is the principal architect for Microsoft technologies at enterprise software development firm Cynergy Systems warned that the technology, if not well understood, could pave the way to badly designed programs.