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How to include keywords and aliases in Roslyn recommended symbols?

I am using Roslyn to create a C# scripting control with IntelliSense.
I am generally very happy with the results I am getting, however, the recommended symbols don't include keywords such as for and if et cetera and also don't contain type aliases such as int, when it includes Int32.
More specifically, I am using Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.Recommendations, that is:
Recommender.GetRecommendedSymbolsAtPositionAsync(mySemanticModel, scriptPosition, myAdhocWorkspace);
My SemanticModel object is obtained from a C# compilation which always has a reference to mscorlib.dll at the very least.
At all positions in my script, the recommended completions are always correct. However, I would argue that they are incomplete if they are missing keywords such as if, else and for etc.
I can see that it would be easy for me to include common type aliases in my IntelliSense manually. That is, if Int32 is a possible completion, then I could manually add int.
However, it is less obvious when an if statement or a for statement or even is/as would be appropriate in the given scope.
Is there a way to include these keywords when getting the recommended symbols this way?
Is there also a way to automatically include type aliases?

It seems that Recommender.GetRecommendedSymbolsAtPositionAsync provides only symbols completion. That mean, Methods, Types etc (ISymbol implementations).
If you want keywords or snippets completion, you can use Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.Completion.CompletionService
void CompletionExample()
{
var code = #"using System;
namespace NewConsoleApp
{
class NewClass
{
void Method()
{
fo // I want to get 'for' completion for this
}
}
}";
var completionIndex = code.LastIndexOf("fo") + 2;
// Assume you have a method that create a workspace for you
var workspace = CreateWorkspace("newSln", "newProj", code);
var doc = workspace.CurrentSolution.Projects.First().Documents.First();
var service = CompletionService.GetService(doc);
var completionItems = service.GetCompletionsAsync(doc, completionIndex).Result.Items;
foreach (var result in completionItems)
{
Console.WriteLine(result.DisplayText);
Console.WriteLine(string.Join(",", result.Tags));
Console.WriteLine();
}
}
You can play around to figure it out how to customize it for your needs (rules, filters).
Notice that each result comes from a specific completion provider (item.Properties["Provider"]) and you can create a custom CompletionProvider (at least you should be able).
You can also take a look at C# for VS code (that powered with OmniSharp) to see how they did the work.

Find all method calls for a specific method using Roslyn

I am working on a code analyser using Roslyn and my current task is to find all internal methods which are unused in the assembly.
I start with a MethodDeclarationSyntax and get the symbol from that. I then use the FindCallersAsync method in SymbolFinder, but it returns an empty collection even when I am making a call to the method in question somewhere in the assembly. See the code below.
protected override void Analyze(SyntaxNodeAnalysisContext context)
{
NodeToAnalyze = context.Node;
var methodDeclaration = NodeToAnalyze as MethodDeclarationSyntax;
if (methodDeclaration == null)
return;
var methodSymbol = context.SemanticModel.GetDeclaredSymbol(methodDeclaration) as ISymbol;
if (methodSymbol.DeclaredAccessibility != Accessibility.Internal)
return;
var solutionPath = GetSolutionPath();
var msWorkspace = MSBuildWorkspace.Create();
var solution = msWorkspace.OpenSolutionAsync(solutionPath).Result;
var callers = SymbolFinder.FindCallersAsync(symbol, solution).Result; // Returns empty collection.
...
}
I have seen similar code here, but in that example the method symbol is obtained using GetSymbolInfo on an InvocationExpressionSyntax:
//Get the syntax node for the first invocation to M()
var methodInvocation = doc.GetSyntaxRootAsync().Result.DescendantNodes().OfType<InvocationExpressionSyntax>().First();
var methodSymbol = model.GetSymbolInfo(methodInvocation).Symbol;
//Finds all references to M()
var referencesToM = SymbolFinder.FindReferencesAsync(methodSymbol, doc.Project.Solution).Result;
However, in my case, I need to find the invocations (if any) from a declaration. If I do get the invocation first and pass in the symbol from GetSymbolInfo the calls to the method are returned correctly - so the issue seems to be with the symbol parameter and not solution.
Since I am trying to get the underlying symbol of a declaration, I cannot use GetSymbolInfo, but use GetDeclaredSymbol instead (as suggested here).
My understanding from this article is that the symbols returned from GetDeclaredSymbol and GetSymbolInfo should be the same. However, a simple comparison using Equals returns false.
Does anyone have any idea of what the difference is between the two symbols returned and how I can get the 'correct' one which works? Or perhaps there is a better approach entirely? All my research seems to point to FindCallersAsync, but I just can't get it to work.

My understanding from this article is that the symbols returned from GetDeclaredSymbol and GetSymbolInfo should be the same. However, a simple comparison using Equals returns false.
This is because they're not the same symbol; they are coming from entirely different compilations which might or might not be different. One is coming from the compiler that is actively compiling, one is coming from MSBuildWorkspace.
Fundamentally, using MSBuildWorkspace in an analyzer is unsupported. Completely. Don't do that. Not only would that be really slow, but it also has various correctness issues, especially if you're running your analyzer in Visual Studio. If your goal is to find unused methods anywhere in a solution, that's something we don't really support implementing as an analyzer either, since that involves cross-project analysis.

How do I create syntax nodes in Roslyn from scratch?

I would like to generate syntax nodes with the Roslyn API without having a pre-existing syntax node. That is, I cannot simply use the WithXYZ() methods on an existing object to modify it because there is no existing object.
For example, I would like to generate an InvocationExpressionSyntax object. Assuming a constructor was available, I could do something like
var invoke = new InvocationExpressionSyntax(expression, arguments);
But the constructor for InvocationExpressionSyntax seems to not be public.
http://www.philjhale.com/2012/10/getting-started-with-roslyn.html
this blog suggests that I can use an API such as
Syntax.InvocationExpression()
but I don't see what Syntax refers to, and I don't see anything that resembles it in the Roslyn API.
I did find Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.VisualBasic.SyntaxFactory that lets me do
var invoke = SyntaxFactory.InvocationExpression().WithExpression(expression);
And this works well enough for me. There is also Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.SyntaxFactory for anyone wondering.
Is SyntaxFactory the proper way to create new syntax nodes?
The way I found SyntaxFactory.InvocationExpression was by looking at the PublicAPI.txt file in the roslyn source code (https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn) under the src/Compilers/VisualBasic/Portable directory. Otherwise, I don't see where SyntaxFactory is documented.

As the other answer stated, the SyntaxFactory is the correct class to use. As you have found there are two syntax factories available, Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.SyntaxFactory and Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.VisualBasic.SyntaxFactory, depending on which language you are using.
Usually the calls into the SyntaxFactory are chained together, so you end up with many calls to the SytnaxFactory methods to generate even simple lines of code. For example, the code Console.WriteLine("A"); would be represented by the following calls to the Syntax Factory:
var console = SyntaxFactory.IdentifierName("Console");
var writeline = SyntaxFactory.IdentifierName("WriteLine");
var memberaccess = SyntaxFactory.MemberAccessExpression(SyntaxKind.SimpleMemberAccessExpression, console, writeline);
var argument = SyntaxFactory.Argument(SyntaxFactory.LiteralExpression(SyntaxKind.StringLiteralExpression, SyntaxFactory.Literal("A")));
var argumentList = SyntaxFactory.SeparatedList(new[] { argument });
var writeLineCall =
SyntaxFactory.ExpressionStatement(
SyntaxFactory.InvocationExpression(memberaccess,
SyntaxFactory.ArgumentList(argumentList)));
If you are unsure of how to generate nodes for some specific code, Kirill Osenkov created the Roslyn Quoter project on GitHub, which you can use to generate the SyntaxFactory code for you.
I recently did a blog post on this topic if you would like to read further.

Yes, the SyntaxFactory type is the way to create syntax nodes from scratch.

Get Symbol for ReferenceLocation

I'm using the SymbolFinder to find all references to a certain type in my solution like this:
ISymbol typeOfInterest = compilation.GetTypeByMetadataName(
"System.Reflection.PropertyInfo");
var references = SymbolFinder.FindReferencesAsync(typeOfInterest, solution).Result;
foreach (var reference in references)
{
// reference.Locations => symbol?
}
This part is working fine, the SymbolFinder returns correct ReferenceLocations (upon manual inspection). I'm actually interested in the symbols at these locations to get more (semantic) information about the references, so I can filter upon / work with it (e.g. only work on properties).
There seems to be very little public information on Roslyn yet and I couldn't find anything working with the results of SymbolFinder in the samples of the SDK Preview. So here is my question: Is it possible to get the symbol corresponding to a ReferenceLocation? How?

So, there isn't strictly a "symbol" at any of these locations, at least no innate concept of that. What you can do is take that Location, and find the enclosing symbol. You can take the location's SyntaxTree and get a Document. From there, call GetSemanticModelAsync, and then call ISemanticModel.GetEnclosingSymbol.
As an example, here's some (internal) code that does this for FAR itself: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/748d6ab1b504ceee0c29f132fdcbe2a777aa88ea/src/Workspaces/Core/Portable/FindSymbols/ReferenceLocationExtensions.cs#L67-L101

Is there .net magic to get parameter values by name in console application?

I've been developing .net console applications using C# and have always just dictated what order parameters must be inserted in so that args[0] is always start date and args[1] is always end date, for example.
however I would like to move over to using named parameters so that any combination of parameters can be sent in any order, such as the typical "-sd" would prefix a start date.
I know I could parse through the args[] looking for "-" and then read the name and look the next position for the accompanying value, but before doing that wanted to see if there was any kind of baked in handling for this rather standard practice.
is there something like this out there already that could do as such:
DateTime startDate = (DateTime)((ConsoleParameters)args[])["sd"]
I'm using C# and .Net 4

There is nothing built into the core framework.
A lot of people think NDesk.Options is useful for this sort of thing. Check out this example (taken directly from the provided link):
string data = null;
bool help = false;
int verbose = 0;
var p = new OptionSet () {
{ "file=", v => data = v },
{ "v|verbose", v => { ++verbose } },
{ "h|?|help", v => help = v != null },
};
List<string> extra = p.Parse (args);

Yes, the "magic" is that this is a common problem and it has been adequately solved. So I recommend using an already written library to handle parsing command line arguments.
CommandLineParser has been great for me. It is reasonably documented and flexible enough for every type of command line argument I've wanted to handle. Plus, it assists with usage documentation.
I will say that I'm not the biggest fan of making a specific class that has to be adorned with attributes to use this library, but it's a minor point considering that it solves my problem. And in reality forcing that attributed class pushes me to keep that class separate from where my app actually retrieves it's settings from and that always seems to be a better design.

You can use NDesk.Options.

There is no such a thing as named parameters. "-sd" is just a choice for a specific application. It can be "/sd" as well. Or "sd=". Or whatever you want.
Since there are no named parameters, there is nothing inside .NET Framework which let you use the "-sd" syntax.
But you can quite easily build your own method to get a set of "named parameters" for your app.
Edit: or, even better, you can use an existing library, like suggested in other answers.
Edit: reading the answer by #Sander Rijken, I see that I was wrong: there were still an implementation of "-sd" syntax in .NET 4.0 before the release. But since it was dropped before the final release, the only ways are still to create your own method or to use an existing library.