Friday, February 3, 2012

vsClojure: It's alive!

vsClojure is alive (again)!

The ability to do Clojure(CLR) development in a Visual Studio context has been a fairly constant demand.  vsClojure,  a VS extension supporting ClojureCLR projects, had been fulfilling this need. 
However, the project had gone quiet for a while and dormancy does not inspire confidence in the OSS world.

Jon, AKA jmis, the author of vsClojure, and I discussed how to move vsClojure forward.  The upshot is that Jon will continue contributing to vsClojure and we''ll transition the maintainer role to me.  What that's meant so far: Jon's been working hard these last few weeks mowing the lawn and pulling some weeds.  I've been applauding his efforts.  Time to invite the neighbors over for a lawn party.  Here's what we're celebrating:

vsClojure has a new home.    The repo has been moved to https://github.com/vsclojure/vsclojure.  The README there has instructions for installing and for building from source.  (Installation is easy:  use the VS extension manager to pull vsClojure from the Visual Studio Gallery.)

vsClojure has a new release. Several outstanding issues were closed.  The big advance is that ClojureCLR 1.3 is now supported.

If you have the old version of vsClojure installed, you will see a notification of vsClojure's new home  if you update the deprecated version.  (I'm not sure if VS will automatically notify you.)


vsClojure is being actively developed.   Jon and I are working on a development plan for enhancements to vsClojure.    Features currently supported include:

  • Clojure project type
  • Building and running clojure projects 
  • Clojure source editor
  • Syntax highlighting
  • Brace matching
  • Auto-indentation
  • Source formatting 
  • Block commenting
  • Hippie completion
  • Integrated REPL 
  • Load all project files into REPL 
  • Load active editor file into REPL
  • Switch to active file's namespace 
  • History 
Let us know what features you'd like to see added or what needs work.   You can create issues on the github repo.  Feel free to start discussions on the discussion group. And, of course, feel free to dive in and hack away.

My thanks to Jon for all the effort he's put in to vsClojure to date.  I'm even more thankful he's willing to keep going.  I'm looking forward to it.


6 comments:

  1. Thank you Jon (jmis) for all your work. David thanks again for adding another clojureclr project to your list of things to maintain!

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  2. Thanks John and David !!

    For those folks who do not have have the Professional or Enterprise versions of Visual Studio but want to use vsClojure. Try Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated) url:
    microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=115

    This works great.

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  3. Just wanted to say I'm very excited about this. I'm a .NET dev by day and just recently became very interested in Clojure. I think having this sort of tooling for the CLR version will be great for people like me to start exploring Clojure in a familiar environment.

    Thanks for all the work you're doing for Clojure CLR.

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    Replies
    1. If you have any expertise in VS extensions, or wish to gain some, we can use all the help we can get on this piece.

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  4. I work on c# most of the time. I'm a complete newbie in Clojure and got interested recently. I installed vsClojure in VS2010, only one project type is available at the moment, which is the executable one. This is great for trying out the shiny new language, but less useful in building non-trivial projects.

    In case it's not on the top of the list, I suggest to create a library type for vsClojure to create .net DLLs in clojure, so we could write core logic stuff in clojure while exposing it to other more convenient front end.

    Clojure is cool and million thanks for its port to .NET platform!

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    Replies
    1. Digged deeper into it, looks like I was wrong. There's not even .exe file, and no no dll file either. Something is a little bit off here i guess.

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