14 DAY TRIAL // Early adopters testing the first Community Technology Preview of the Roslyn Project can download an overview of the compiler as a service offering from Microsoft.
The Redmond company started providing developers with the Roslyn Project CTP last week, after it detailed the technology in mid-September at its Windows 8-centric BUILD conference.
Now that testers can start playing with the Roslyn Project pre-release Build, the software giant is also enabling devs to get insight into the C# and VB compiler’s code analysis via a whitepaper which can be grabbed free of charge via the Microsoft Download Center.
According to the software giant, the purpose of the Roslyn Project is to open up compilers, and make available the information they hold about code.
“Instead of being opaque source-code-in and object-code-out translators, through the Roslyn project, compilers become services—APIs that you can use for code related tasks in your tools and applications,” the company said.
“The transition to compilers as services dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for creating code focused tools and applications. It creates many opportunities for innovation in areas such as meta-programming, code generation and transformation, interactive use of the C# and VB languages, and embedding of C# and VB in domain specific languages.”
Fact is that the whitepaper from Microsoft, designed as a conceptual overview of the project, along with the Roslyn CTP, can be leveraged in tandem in order to understand the company’s view over the compiler as a service concept.
For the time being, Microsoft is offering Roslyn CTP as an extension to Visual Studio 2010 SP1. However, this will change in the future, with the software giant pointing to the post-Visual Studio 11 timeframe.
“The Microsoft “Roslyn” CTP previews the new language object models for code generation, analysis, and refactoring, and the upcoming support for scripting and interactive use of C# and Visual Basic,” the company added.
The Roslyn Project CTP is available for download here.