Visual Studio/RAD support for coding directly in IL?

Question

For the longest time I've been curious to code directly in Intermediate Language as an academic endeavour, to gain a better understanding of what's happening "under the hood".

Does anybody provide Visual Studio support for *IL in the form of: project templates, IntelliSense and RAD tool integration?

Edits: I don't mean restricted to out-of-the-box features. For example, I can download Visual Studio extensions to support Python, COBOL, etc. Looking for the same for *IL.

There is a stand-alone Intermediate Assembler tool so the ability to code and compile it already exists outside Visual Studio.

Answer 1

Wanting the same thing for a long time, I finally decided to make one. It supports syntax highlighting for IL files (.il) and includes projects with full debugging support for C#, F# and Visual Basic that support embedding and calling IL code directly.

IL Support extension

Enjoy!

Answer 2

You might check out the #develop IDE, its not Visual Studio - they have a project template and keyword highlighting but no intellisense for IL (last time I checked).

You can also try ILIDE# but I can't seem to get the thing running anymore. It was built back in .net 1.0 days I believe so it's probably too old.

If you have time and really want to learn it - you could always write an extension for Visual Studio - that would be super cool if you did :)

Answer 3

Nope. VS can't even compile MSIL (which, by the way, is now called CIL: Common Intermediate Language since the CLR was standardized).

Answer 4

Not a "real" support per se, but you can get ilasm to generate PDB files out of .il files when it builds the assembly. You'll be able to use Visual Studio to debug the assembly, set breakpoints, ....