Now that VS2015 is out, what's a supported way to modify Roslyn, with debugging support?

Question

The Context

We'd like to modify Roslyn and be able to debug it while compiling with it. Pre-VS2015 release, doing this was a painful process that didn't flow very well.

Our goal is to develop a C# variant compiler.

The Dream

Pre-VS2015, executing and debugging your modded Roslyn required the opening of a second VS IDE (experimental) set to use your modded Roslyn. This process wasn't straight forward to setup properly, and oftentimes would break your VS2015 installation.

Post-VS2015, is there a better setup and process possible to modify and debug Roslyn?

I have installed Visual Studio 2015 but it looks like I need more required bits. After that I'm unsure how to run the tests and try the changes in VS2015.

Answer 1

We have our current documented process of testing your own versions of Roslyn here. As long as you're on Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 or later (where we did all the work to support this), everything should work.

The executive summary of those instructions is if you now enlist into Roslyn, you can choose the "VisualStudioSetup" project and just hit F5 to run. That builds to .vsix files in your build directory you can also install. If you want to, there's a CompilerExtension project that produces a compiler you can build with.