Where is Visual-D C# code?

[Rainer Schuetze via Digitalmars-d-ide]

On 31.10.2015 00:19, Ramon wrote:
> I use Visual-D for Visual Studio daily for writing D programs. Also I am
> very experienced in writing Visual Studio extensions, I wrote this
> commercial one: http://misoftware.rs/OmniCode.
>
> Now, looking at Visual-D source code, 85% is D code. Well, at first it
> seems OK to write a D extension for D in D, but I wonder, how do you
> manage to use all .NET APIs from D?
>
> Because for implementing every aspect of a language extension in Visual
> Studio (Intellisense, outlining, QuickInfo, signature help, snippets),
> in my experience, you really need to work with the .NET assemblys of the
> Visual Studio Extensibility SDK. I guess you are doing it in a old COM
> way, which I think is still supported by VS. But I think that is far
> from being productive. Also I doubt you can support every new aspect of
> VS editor experience, because since VS 2010 I think, the editor is based
> on WPF, so it is .NET in all its glory.
>
> I am just worried if Visual-D is taking the right approach for
> implementing stuff. I could definitely help in the C# area.

You are right that writing Visual D in D has not been the easiest way to 
write an extension for VS. The first attempt was actually a derivation 
of a C# extension, but I hated it (I might be more relaxed about this 
today). Please note that this was before the release of VS2010, so VS 
itself was not based on C# as much as today.

My reasoning was this: why should I spend my spare time writing code in 
a language I don't like? Writing it in D seemed natural instead, and 
actually doing this meant contributing to the dmd 
compiler/library/toolchain resulting in automatic conversion of Windows 
and VS SDK to D, DLL support for D, precise GC and numerous bug fixes.

Most functionality can be accessed through COM, but WPF seems to be very 
different. That's why there is vdextensions.csproj to integrate some 
stuff that I didn't manage to access directly.