Decompiler CodeCamp 16 Dec 2008

As I was writing in my last entry, announcing the most awesome Cecil.Decompiler library, I took my last week off to host a CodeCamp event at my parents place in the quiet place of Ardèche, France. I had the pleasure to host, by order of arrival,

• Romain Verdier
• Patrice Lamarche
• Vincent Bourdon
• Robert Pickering
• Mathieu Szablowski
• Sébastien Lebreton

While I was working on the core of the decompiler, I paired with Romain to work on improving our pattern matching story, to refine a basic AST to something more evolved. We still clearly need to do some work here, as we're not completely satisfied with what we came with. Robert with his experience of F# and pattern matching then helped Romain. Patrice worked on a NUnit addin which allow us to write tests that are executed for both optimized and non optimized code. He then joined Vincent to work on the Visual Basic language support. Vincent also wrote a ColoredConsoleFormatter, which adds some color to my tests in the console routines. Robert started a Windows.Forms front tend in F# a while ago, but we decided to switch to C#, to lower the entry barrier for contributions. The inimitable Sébastien took the responsibility to write the front-end for the next millennium. I'll force him to blog on it ASAP. Mathieu took the pictures. He sadly was busy working on a presentation he had to do for a client next week. On the next monday, Vincent told me something like: wow it's quite depressing, I barely had a single laugh today, while we were laughing every five minutes during the last few days. So we maybe weren't the most productive crowd of week-end hackers, but at least we had tons of fun. I guess that if I had a lesson to take from the event, it would have been to prepare it a little bit more, and have more fine grained tasks, but I also loved the organic way it evolved. Thanks guys for the week-end, hopefully we'll manage to organize more of those CodeCamp.