NRefactory capable of parsing .NET 4.6?

Question

I have been successfully using NRefactory and just started having problems parsing source code that uses some newer .NET features. One feature in particular that I have noticed is string interpolation. When NRefactory sees something like $"File: {myFile}" it has total failure parsing it. Is there a new version of the code that will handle dot-NET 4.6 or is there a flag that I need to set? If not, is there another easy way to get parse trees from source code?

If I wanted to use Roslyn, is there a way to do this with VS 2015 or is VS 2017 or later required? Tried opening Roslyn SLN in VS 2015 and none of the projects loaded.

Answer 1

NRefactory does not support C# 6 or newer features, which would impact string interpolation. According to NRefactory,

There is currently no maintainer for NRefactory. If you need a C# parser / compiler frontend, use Microsoft.CodeAnalysis (Roslyn) instead.

The refactorings in NRefactory have been ported to Roslyn: https://github.com/icsharpcode/RefactoringEssentials/

You can use Roslyn with Visual Studio 2015, as long as you have .NET 4.6 or higher installed, though 4.7.2 is the recommended version to use by Roslyn team. Lastly, you will need to the following:

Install Universal Windows App Development Tools -> Tools (1.1.1) and Windows SDK, Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.0/8.1 tools -> Tools and Windows SDKs and Visual Studio Extensibility Tools