Roslyn: Online preview/branch C# compiler similar to jsfiddle?

[dsaf]

Visual Studio "15" preview 5 is still not recommended to be installed in production environment. So I cannot install it either at home or at work. There is no ready-made virtual machine image. Also I believe I have a good enough idea of new features without going through the pain of a complete setup. Still I want to test a specific pattern matching scenario.

Wouldn't it be nice to have something like http://trycsharp.org or http://csfiddle.net that would let people try the very latest preview versions of the compiler? Ideally even non-preview language feature forks. This way people can also link to executable snippets for examples in issues etc.

Maybe conference visitors could even try new compiler live at Build 2017 straight away as opposed having to install the whole IDE on their laptops.

Besides that and popularity of C# it never hurts to have a general learning/promotional website for a language. I am not even asking for C# Playgrounds for iPad and Android :).

[hmemcpy]

There is already TryRoslyn, which lets you play with Roslyn branches online.

[daveaglick]

For completeness, there's also http://dotnetfiddle.net and http://gistlyn.com

[DavidArno]

@hmemcpy,

How do I then work around the "Predefined type 'System.ValueTuple'2' is not defined or imported" problem? Surely that should be auto-imported into such an online test system?

@daveaglick,

dotnetfiddle appears to still be using a rc version of Roslyn 1.0. That's not much use for testing C# 7 potential features :smile:

[svick]

@DavidArno You can define your own ValueTuple and TupleElementNamesAttribute.

[DavidArno]

@svick,

Um, why would I want to do that? :confused:

[dsaf]

@hmemcpy it's actually quite usable, thanks @ashmind!

[dsaf]

@daveaglick both don't support C# 7 preview and thus are useless for testing upcoming syntax. I have stable VS 2015 for C# 6. Unless there is a menu/mode that I failed to find?

[daveaglick]

@DavidArno @dsaf Yeah, no support for latest features on either AFAIK. Just figured I'd drop them in the issue so anyone looking for general online runners in the future who happens to stumble here will find a more complete list.

[svick]

@DavidArno Because that's the only workaround I know. Being able to reference the System.ValueTuple package would be obviously better, but TryRoslyn does not let you do that.

[jasonmalinowski]

If there's an issue with TryRoslyn then you all should probably file that bug over on https://github.com/ashmind/TryRoslyn. I'm going to close this issue as I don't think there's a request here for us that isn't already satisfied by TryRoslyn (or wouldn't be best done by a contribution there.)

[ashmind]

Just FYI, I don't plan to allow user-selected NuGet packages at the moment, but I'll look into adding ValueTuple package explicitly — hopefully this evening (NZ time).

[ashmind]

Done and deployed, example here:
http://tryroslyn.azurewebsites.net/#b:master/K4Zwlgdg5gBAygTxAFwKYFsDcAoADsAIwBswBjGUogQxBBgGEYBvbGNmfYsmACkmRhUANDBQAnSLAIBKGAAVmMKKmSZRKtQF9smoA===

[DavidArno]

@ashmind,

You sir, are a star! :clap: