Episode 028 – Exploring Roslyn with Kathleen Dollard

What does the future hold for the C# language and the .NET compiler? All we know for certain is that its very tightly-tied to the Project:Roslyn effort!

In this episode of Hallway Conversations, the team sits down to chat with Kathleen Dollard about the amazing opportunities that the upcoming .NET compiler (code-name: Roslyn) will offer to the .NET developer ecosystem. Kathleen digs into the difference between Abstract and Semantic Syntax Trees as well as what having those exposed to developers at compile-time might really mean for the opportunities to do incredibly powerful transformations during compilation.

Kathleen also shares with us her efforts to craft a more human-friendly wrapper around the lower-level DOM-related Roslyn APIs and in the process we discover a lot more about how Roslyn really works.

We also explore some of the additions to the C# language in the upcoming C# 6.0 and begin to understand how the addition of several new keywords will make for even less ceremony in your future C# code.

Steve even asks (again!) for the ‘immutable’ keyword to be added to the language, but sadly that’s still not yet coming even in C# 6.0 🙂

Show Notes

Blog: http://blogs.msmvps.com/kathleen
Wintellect videos on C# 6.0: https://www.wintellectnow.com
RoslynDom source and issues: https://github.com/KathleenDollard/RoslynDOM
RoslynDom on NuGet: Suggest starting with examples: http://www.nuget.org/packages/RoslynDomExampleTests
Microsoft’s Roslyn project: www.Roslyn.CodePlex.com
Visual Studio “14” downloads: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-14-ctp-vs.aspx

Kathleen Dollard wants to teach you to code better. There’s more to learn about the tools you use every day and the tools you aren’t yet using. Coding is our passion and debugging is our challenge – you’ll be happier if you do both better. Kathleen’s written dozens of articles, spoken at conferences and user groups around the world, and pushed Microsoft to respond to your real world needs as a long time MVP. Her Open Source project RoslynDom offers alterative access to information in the .NET Compiler Platform, Roslyn with a load/interrogate/mutate/build SyntaxTree model. She has courses in the Pluralsight library and a series of C# 6 webcasts now available for free on WintellectNOW.