mscfront project

hi, stephane. the tool is not formally available -- largely because of issues with the pre-processor and because i can't do everything myself despite what people might believe :-). it works on an 80-20 basis, in which the 20 is largely macros buckshot through code -- you can train mscfront to recognize and process macros, if you wish to, or you can just comment out lines with embedded macros and the tool reproduces the line verbatim. i have tried to interest outside microsoft groups in taking the tool over -- it is composed of a (a) c++ parser -- accepts the managed extensions, and ansi\iso c++, (b) a full set of Abstract Syntax Trees for both native C++ and the CTS, and an example of a Ent, or tree-walker, this one generating C++\CLI code. it comes with a brief architectual guide and a much less brief user guide. if you or anyone wishes the source, my understanding is that my management is fine with releasing it. of course, that said, if you wished to have it -- it's a brainless Visual Studio Project -- so it really only requires hitting ! on the Visual Studio command line to build. if you build the debug version, it will trace out all its processing, and options are available for interactive mode, and to spill the token stream it builds up. remaining work includes a persistant store of the trees, support for aliasing [within namespaces], and some more advanced template support -- as a thing to play with, i find it a lot of fun. it's only when it becomes entangled with the complicated product discipline microsoft must impose on its products that made it impossible for me to complete -- that's just the nature of being the largest software company in the world. ideally, i would love to see a group of folks take it and build up a free C++\CLI/ISO-C++ development environment, but that would require obviously some work -- if anyone is interested in the source, it is written in very vanilla iso-C++ with a few visual c++-isms to read files ... and i've also gotten it to compiler under the Beta 2 using the \clr switch. if anyone is interested, drop me a line, and i will send you both versions, the documentation, and answer any and all questions. that's really the best i can do. if you have any further questions, just ask, but i only saw this because my colleague Ayman Shoukry, our community interface, so to speak, forwarded it to me. so any direct mail to me should go to slippman@microsoft.com, if it is microsoft related, or stan.lippman@gmail.com if it involves anything else.

thank you,

Stanley Lippman
Author, C++ Primer, 4E and Inside the C++ Object Model