Since coming back to the Visual Studio Languages team recently, I’ve been working on features for Visual Studio 15 that aren’t really ready for public testing yet. But we’ve now put up a teaser blog post, ‘A Vision For Visual Studio “15”: Take on Dependencies. Stay Productive.‘, that covers some of the things I’ve been working on.
Specifically, we’re looking at ways that Visual Studio can provide better navigability for dependencies that you take on library that have source available in places like GitHub or TFS. When using, say, JSON.NET, it would be nice to be able to do F12 and go the definition of something without having to clone the repo and figuring out how to compile it correctly. And it would be nice to be able to see usages of JSON.NET APIs across open source dependencies to be able to see how other people are using the APIs.
The idea behind it is to leverage Roslyn to extract semantic information about open source libraries (starting, of course, with Roslyn itself) and then make that information available to Visual Studio language services just as if those projects were in your solution. We’re still in the earlier phases of this work, but we should hopefully have something soon you can actually play with…
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