Visual Studio/RAD support for coding directly in IL?

Question

For the longest time I've been curious to code in Intermediate Language just as an academic endeavour and 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 integration, and those kind of RAD features?

Edits: I don't mean restricted to out-of-the-box support. For example, I can download Visual Studio extensions to support Python, COBOL, etc. Want the same for *IL.

There is a stand-alone Intermediate Assembler tool.

Answer 1

Nope. VS can't even compile MSIL (which, by the way, is now called CIL: Common Intermediate Language since the CLR was standardized).

Answer 2

Not a "real" support per se, but you can get ilasm to generate PDB files out of .il files when it builds the assembly. You'll be able to use Visual Studio to debug the assembly, set breakpoints, ....

Answer 3

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 :)