Not to get anyone excited, especially a particular executive director of a popular foundation, but I’ve managed to enter, build, and run my first C# program using the CDT.

I had previously did a language extension for C# that provides syntax coloring for the C# keywords and associated the CEditor with .cs files. In the last hour (while trying to watch a poorly played curling game on TV – yes, they broadcast curling games on the national sports cable channel in Canada), I took everything I learned from my exercise of getting my other build integrations working this week and thought I’d give a build integration for the Microsoft C# compiler a try. After a little tweaking to handle this special case where there is only one tool that takes all .cs files and produces a .exe, I hit the build button and an exe came out.

Luckily for us, Microsoft has reused their PE executable format for .Net apps, so the CDT immediately recognized the end .exe file as an executable file, so I created a launch config for it and hit the run button. “Hello World” it said in the Console view. Tres cool!

Now there’s a lot of functionality that’s not there. There’s no debugger and there’s no parser to fill the outline view and index. So there’s a long way to go. But it was cool to see.