At 9:31 am -0700 6/8/02, Hal Daume III wrote:
I apologize for the OT post, but I know there are a lot of @microsoft.com people here and was hoping to see if anyone there or elsewhere had answers to a few questions...
I know MS has been touting .net as cross language and cross platform and I know that at least in many of their talks they mention languages like SML, Haskell, OCaml, Mercury, etc. and being developed for .net. I have a vague idea of how the progress is going on these.
What I'm more intersted in right now is this: they have an *excellent* development environment (Visual Studio) and have had it for years. But, as far as I know, it is not configurable in the sense that I really couldn't use it to develop applications in any of the languages listed above -- it supports, C/++/#, ASP, and visual basic, as far as I know.
Does anyone know if either it already does, or if MS plans to support other more esoteric languages in the development environment...
Visual Studio can be extended to support other languages, but it is not a weekend job ;-) To do this you usually need to join (= buy) into VS Integration Program, if you are commercial there are a number of quality assurance requirements before you can badge something as supporting VS. Daan Leijen (from Utrecht) did work with the Microsoft Visual Studio group to make the job easier. I am sorry I cannot say whether this work is generally available. As part of Project 7, a Microsoft project with various language developers during the development of .NET a number of languages added VS support, ranging from simple syntax colouring and "makefile" project support to full integration. Mondrian, the simple functional scripting language, was one of these which I undertook, it's at the simple end. However I did not also add support for Haskell (I did a partial port [not speed optimised and many libraries missing] of GHC to .NET using Mondrian as a backend). Other languages integrated include Fortran (Salford), Cobol (Fujitsu) and Component Pascal (QUT). HTH, Nigel -- Nigel Perry, New Zealand