Book Image

Roslyn Cookbook

Book Image

Roslyn Cookbook

Overview of this book

Open-sourcing the C# and Visual Basic compilers is one of the most appreciated things by the .NET community, especially as it exposes rich code analysis APIs to analyze and edit code. If you want to use Roslyn API to write powerful extensions and contribute to the C# developer tool chain, then this book is for you. Additionally, if you are just a .NET developer and want to use this rich Roslyn-based functionality in Visual Studio to improve the code quality and maintenance of your code base, then this book is also for you. This book is divided into the following broad modules: 1. Writing and consuming analyzers/fixers (Chapters 1 - 5): You will learn to write different categories of Roslyn analyzers and harness and configure analyzers in your C# projects to catch quality, security and performance issues. Moving ahead, you will learn how to improve code maintenance and readability by using code fixes and refactorings and also learn how to write them. 2. Using Roslyn-based agile development features (Chapters 6 and 7): You will learn how to improve developer productivity in Visual Studio by using features such as live unit testing, C# interactive and scripting. 3. Contributing to the C# language and compiler tool chain (Chapters 8 - 10): You will see the power of open-sourcing the Roslyn compiler via the simple steps this book provides; thus, you will contribute a completely new C# language feature and implement it in the Roslyn compiler codebase. Finally, you will write simple command line tools based on the Roslyn service API to analyze and edit C# code.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Dedication

Using Roslyn Syntax Visualizer to view Roslyn syntax tokens and nodes for a source file


The Syntax Visualizer is a Visual Studio extension that facilitates the inspection and exploration of Roslyn syntax trees and can be used as a debugging aid when you develop your own applications atop the .NET Compiler Platform (Roslyn) APIs.

In this section, we will show you how to install and use the Roslyn Syntax Visualizer to view the syntax tree, nodes, and properties of C# and Visual Basic source code in Visual Studio. You can also view the semantics associated with the syntax nodes, such as symbol information, type information, and compile time constant value of expressions.

Getting Started

You need to install the .NET Compiler Platform SDK to install the Roslyn Syntax Visualizer. For guidance on installing the SDK, refer to the recipe, Creating, debugging, and executing an analyzer project in Visual Studio, in Chapter 1, Writing Diagnostic Analyzers.

How to do it...

  1. Open Visual Studio and start the...