Parsing C# source code

Question

I'm trying to parse a simple.cs source file using the following code:

CodeDomProvider provider = CodeDomProvider.CreateProvider("CSharp");
var compileUnit = provider.Parse(File.OpenText(filename));

This gives me a NotImplementedException:

"This CodeDomProvider does not support this method"

Is it true that .NET does not provide an implemenation for parsing C# code? Or am I just using this class the wrong way?

Edit: The reason for doing this is that I want to toy around with some methods for static code analysis. Compiling or executing the code is not required for my research.

Answer 1

Yes, that's true, the CodeDomProvider is for emitting source code, not reading it. Various companies have their own parsers and recently Microsoft started project Roslyn that provides such features.