Support for VBA refactoring about vscode-vba

[cezarypiatek]

Hi @spences10

I've found a VB pareser in c# https://github.com/icsharpcode/ILSpy/tree/master/NRefactory.VB/ICSharpCode.NRefactory.VB

Maybe we could try to port it to TypeScript using for example Rosetta https://github.com/andry-tino/Rosetta

Unfortunately ICSharpCode.NRefactory.VB seems to be abandon (ILSpy go forward without it) and I've had problem with checking out working revision.

Btw, thanks for the links. I will investigate it in the free time.

[spences10]

Hi @cezarypiatek,

Apologies I have only come across this issue by chance rather than by being notified by GitHub, the language extension features are what I have wanted to incorporate into this for a while now but have not got the skill or knowledge on how to implement something like this.

I'll take a look at the link and try not to get lost in the documentation 😄

Is this something you could attempt to do yourself I'd happily accept a PR or if you are doing your own version then please share a link so I can see how you have done it 😄

Thanks

[spences10]

@cezarypiatek I've had a look around and found this thread which explains a bit as to why this hasn't been done yet particularly this comment from @chrisdias

I don't think it is possible to do by a third party either, as there isn't an easily consumable API for the compiler.

[spences10]

Wow, good find @cezarypiatek

What issues were you having checking out working revision?

I'm guessing you're a Visual Studio user?

[cezarypiatek]

Yes, I'm using Visual Studio.

I've checkout master but ILSpy.sln does not contains ICSharpCode.NRefactory.VB project, so I've created branch from a6ae2e4b24241ad8a4430f3aa55f99ca934f69b3 revision (the last that contains changes in NRefactory.VB directory). Next I've checkout all submodules (NRefactory is a submodule). Now I have ILSpy.sln with ICSharpCode.NRefactory.VB (and all NRefactory projects) but it still does not compile.
For example there is a missing namespace ICSharpCode.NRefactory.PatternMatching etc. Maybe the NRefactory submodule is from wrong revision.

[cezarypiatek]

Finally I managed to checkout working version but I was unable to parse VBA sample code. It looks like this is a VB.NET parser and I doesn't work with VBA. Maybe with a litte twist we could make it work with VBA but I'm not sure if I want to waste my life for it - there is a lot of unused method, a lot of commented out code and so much magic numbers which drive parser logic...

[spences10]

Yeah, I think this will take a lot of time.

I spent a bit of time looking into a language server and was out of my depth