Red Gate's Down Tools Week

Just a short post to kick off the week. As some people may now, the company I work for, Red Gate Software, is having a 'Down Tools' week, where we are free to work on any project we like. It's an opportunity to (hopefully!) write some cool code and try some things out.

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/02/what-will-happen-when-a-software-company-downs-tools-for-a-week.html

 The project I'm going to be working on is attempting to add some level of support for F# to .NET Reflector. We're not sure how much of it we're going to be able to do, but we're really hopeful that we're going to be able to produce something by the end of the week that we're going to be able to put out there and let people have a go with. We'll try and keep you updated with progress as we go!

3 Comments

  • One of the conditions of Down Tools week is that all the work is going to be contained within this week, and we're going to be 'show and tell'ing after lunch on Thursday. Not sure that we're going to have a huge amount of it done by then. The total scope of adding F# support overall would be enormous. The idea is basically that we're starting from some simple F# programs, and gradually working our way up to more and more complicated examples and seeing how far we get.

    In the process, we're starting to notice some parts of the Reflector object model that Add-in authors use that are currently marked as internal (so the authors don't get access) that are useful for doing some parts of the work, which we will be feeding back into our systems to possibly expose in a release at some point.

  • Well, it turns out that I didn't wind up getting a huge amount done, in between doing developer interviews (if you're a great developer, and want to be join us, get in touch!) and being off ill for some of the days. Oh well.

    Clive managed to get some short examples working. I think his conclusion was that providing full F# support in Reflector would actually be quite a tricky project, and would take a fair while to do. It does appear though that it might be something that could become the focus of an add-in, but we'd need to open up some more of the internal methods in the public interface.

  • Hi how did you go with the f# addin the reflector support for f# is still fairly basic at the moment.

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