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).