Add LINQPad plugin

[kirill-gerasimenko]

Hi,

Here is PR that adds LinqPad view plugin. I find it very useful.
Hope it will be for others.

[stephen-swensen]

This is really nice! But it doesn't compile in VS2010... are you able / willing to back port?

[kirill-gerasimenko]

Actually I don't have VS2010 on any of my machines :( What I did here is taken VS2015 project format, lowered ToolsVersion to 4.0 and hoped for the best :) I could try copying the other project and change it, but I can't check if it works.
At my another branch I've converted all the projects to the VS2015 format and latest F#, but also changed folders structure (and did some other additions). But I'm not sure you are interested in this kind of changes.

[stephen-swensen]

All cool, I think I should have a pretty easy time fixing the project for VS2010 myself -- I am still trying to maintain backwards compatibility there.

[stephen-swensen]

So I've got the project format fixed for VS2010 and pushed to a branch for now: https://github.com/SwensenSoftware/fseye/tree/kirill-gerasimenko-linqpad_plugin. But

• I want to test that the plugin works on mono
• I am concerned about the size of the linqpad .exe, and haven't looked into the license terms for distributing that .exe

Ultimately, I think this plugin may be a nice candidate for distribution through a separate channel rather than packaged as a default plugin (e.g. distribute as a separate NuGet package). One way or another, this is a really nice plugin and would be great to make widely available.

[kirill-gerasimenko]

Hi,

If the plugin is not included in the main distribution than it means that it should be manually copied to "plugins" folder along with it's dependencies, right? This doesn't sound easy :)
I can extend initialization mechanism (which is now opening module and adding print transformer) with a module's variable which holds additional list of folders to be probed during start, something like (I haven't looked at initialization yet, it's just an example of the idea):

openSwensen.FsEye.Fsi
Swensen.FsEye.PluginsFolders.add @"c:\..."
fsi.AddPrintTransformer eye.Listener //attached the listener

What do you think?