The main VS extension for running a fragment and displaying results (similar to a clock)

Question

I would like to develop an extension for Visual Studio that runs a small piece of code at runtime after a breakpoint has been removed.

To add some clarity, I really want to name some code in the same way as I do, manually writing it in the immediate window and displaying the results well (preferably a tree view).

I did not want to publish this question, since it seems rather broad at first glance, but I am sure that there are not many ways to do this.

I really studied Roslyn, but I find compilation-time only if I'm not mistaken?

I have the code to do this already, and it works fine in the direct window, but I want to add it as a function, as it is a bit cumbersome to manually enter it, and it is also not easy to execute it. what I need is somewhere between the “clock” and the “immediate” function.

Question

What platform / technology allows me to extend Visual Studio so that at runtime I can run ad hoc snippets and display the results well?

Answer 1

I suggest exploring this:

• Aspect Oriented Programming
• DynamicProxy Lock
• And possibly CSharpScript.EvaluateAsync to evaluate code snippets at runtime

Answer 2

Q: What platform / technology allows me to extend Visual Studio so that at runtime I can run ad hoc snippets and display the results well?

I would approach this as follows:

• Create a visual studio extension in a new window. This includes installing the Visual Studio SDK (it ships with VS now), and then creating the window in the usual way. For example, you can check out my project https://github.com/atlaste/CPPCoverage → CoverageExt, for which there is code. There are also many examples at https://github.com/Microsoft/VSSDK-Extensibility-Samples .
• To do this, first create a tiny C # file in the temp folder.

Basically you create a function as follows:

 // Add some convenient using's. public class EvaluationClass { public static object Evaluate() { return /* paste the evaluated expression here */; } } 

The good thing about this method is that the results are automatically boxed / cast to object , which is great. The only problem here is that you can do a second compilation run for the void case, which will fail because it cannot be placed in the / casted box for the object.

Further

3. Use csc.exe to compile the dll. Handle the errors accordingly. CSC is located in your .NET platform folder ( c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework[x]\... )
4. Use reflection to load the DLL and execute the method in the extension.

The main trick is as follows:

 try { var assembly = Assembly.Load(tempDllName); // TODO: check if assembly is null --> compilation error var eval = assembly.GetType("EvaluationClass").GetMethod("Evaluate"); // TODO: check if eval is null --> compilation error var result = eval.Invoke(); // Draw result on window } catch (Exception ex) { // Handle exception appropriately } 

5. Improve this ... the most useful thing here is to grab the top stack stack from the debugger and pass the this object as value to the method ... I have not considered how to do this; it should be available in the API somewhere though ...