Building Testing and Debugging

Building, Testing and Debugging

This page contains instructions for building Roslyn on Windows. For special instructions on building Roslyn on Linux see here.

Known Issues

Please see the known contributor issues that you might encounter contributing to Roslyn. If you issue isn't listed, please file it.

Required Software

• Visual Studio 2015 with the Visual Studio Extensibility and Windows 10 tools optional components installed
• To prevent unnecessary project.json changes and slow builds, turn off NuGet package restore within Visual Studio
  • Uncheck Tools -> Options -> NuGet Package Manager -> General -> Automatically check for missing packages during build in Visual Studio

Getting the code

1. Open Developer Command Prompt for VS2015
2. Clone https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn
3. Run: nuget.exe restore Roslyn.sln
4. Due to Issue #5876, you should build on the command line before opening in Visual Studio. Run: msbuild /v:m /m Roslyn.sln
5. Open Roslyn.sln

Solutions

There are three solutions in the Roslyn tree:

Compilers.sln: Contains just C# and VB compilers, and the compiler APIs.

Roslyn.sln: Contains entirety of Roslyn including the C# and VB compilers and the compiler APIs, workspace APIs, features layer, language service, and other Visual Studio integration pieces. This is the solution most contributors should open.

CrossPlatform.sln: Represents all the projects that we build across Linux, Windows and Mac. This solution is changing regularly as we bring more and more code to Linux and Mac.

Running Tests

Tests cannot be run via Test Explorer due to some Visual Studio limitations.

To run tests:

From a Visual Studio Command Prompt:

msbuild /v:m /m BuildAndTest.proj

This will build and run all tests which are supported on Visual Studio 2015.

To debug tests:

1. Right-click on the test project you want to debug and choose Set as Start Project
2. Press F5 to start debugging

Alternatively, some members of the team have been working on a WPF runner that allows selection of individual tests, etc. Grab the source from xunit.runner.wpf, build it and give it a try.

Contributing

Please see Contributing Code for details on contributing changes back to the code.

Deploying and testing within Visual Studio

There is not a supported way to deploy and test any changes you have made within Visual Studio itself. We're currently working on adding support for this and it will be coming soon.