Just updated the compiler and integration from revision 7860 to 8060. Had no chances to look carefully for changes in this big gap, only read the log, and what I noticed is the following.

Compiler: a fix for incremental rebuild (7883), which should preserve a bit more time while building now. Extension methods should be now externally visible (7893). Filter method for Hashtable is implemented (7917). Some tweaks for locations (7956, 7970, 7980, 7982), some changes for literals parsing (8045), those should be good for refactoring features. The integration is merged into the compiler trunk (8060)!

Integration: new batch for building appeared (7952). Highlights for tail calls (7967). Rename refactoring (7968 etc.): good work by Sergei Tulentsev, regardless of the feature maturity (I'll check it out later). 'Go to type' navigation feature (7969). Inline refactoring (7990), I'm already interested. Some WPF support (8017). April CTP (8018), currently the last, I guess. VS2005 support is dropped (8018), quite a decision, I'd rather say.

Building of the compiler (with help of Compiler\buildandreg.cmd) passed all the stages flawlessly. Compiling the integration (Compiler\VsIntegration\build_dev.cmd), there are warnings about circular dependencies, but as I remember, that's some glitch from the past that is not breaking anything, but hard to circumvent. In other respects the integration builds without obstacles, that's good.

Opening my pet project under VS2008 with an experimental hive ("C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" my-pet-project.sln /rootsuffix Exp /RANU)... success. Building... errors... obviously, some references fell off (referenced namespace 'System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap' does not exist). Adding them back, compiling, success.

Jumping from Error List and Output windows to a source doesn't work now. Checking out Rename refactoring for a local variable: it's working, cool! Inline refactoring: doesn't work. Anyway, that's a good
startup. Ok, I'll proceed another day.

This blog will be devoted solely to my programming trials, in particularly with the Nemerle programming language and its integration subproject with Visual Studio. I have little time now for doing that, as I am currently a Ph.D. student in the Netherlands (mathematical physics), but I'm interested very much e.g. in implementing refactoring for Nemerle.

I already spent around a year (of leisurely work) for the Nemerle integration project and implemented for instance such features, as Find usages, Highlight symbol and a mini-framework for extensive testing of such stuff. Then I made a large break in playing with the integration (however, continuing with Nemerle itself) lasting up to now, and I'm planning to proceed with it, contributing from time to time.