Patrick Cooney's Weblog

waspectj

2004-10-03

I need some way of querying source code in Visual Studio, so I decided to hack out something in a day and see what it looked like. The 'design' fits on a napkin:

Has expressions for selecting classes, methods/members based on name
Supports selection of members based on interactions with other classes, members based on name
Supports wild-carding of names
Supports compound, boolean statements
Runs in VS, with a macro interface (for now)

This is really the evil (e.g. static, designed over breakfast) twin of the AspectJ pcd: hence waspectj. In AspectJ terms, the sort of queries I want to execute are:

	instanceof(sometype) && calls(a.b(int))

	calls(a.*(*))

	handles(someException)

But I want them to run against the currently loaded solution in VS, and return me some sort of graph showing the match and the context (e.g. if I'm matching on a method, give me the class as well). Turns out I need more than a day to do this - the implementation is coming along sloooowly. The only query running at 11pm is "get me a class with a name" (e.g. "instanceof(name)"). However, I haven't thought about the concrete syntax, so I don't have a parser, and I am just building expressions by hand. And no wild cards.

I think the problem is that I spent most of the day reading Running Money, but I'm pretty much on top of traversing the solution in VS, so hopefully I'll have some more expressions working this week.

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