[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: Haskell support for Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Assignment Manager tools

[Andre W B Furtado]

We are pleased to announce an alpha/preview version of VHS (Visual Haskell),
which integrates the Haskell functional language with the Microsoft Visual
Studio .NET 2003 IDE, and VHS-AM, which allows the use of VHS with the
Microsoft Assignment Manager tools.

This preview version supports:
- Syntax coloring
- Brace matching through CTRL+] (including "module/where", "let/in", etc.)*
- Brace highlighting (including "module/where", "let/in", etc.)*
- Brace matching text indicated in the status bar
- "TODO" comments in code are added to the task list and can be reached by
double-clicking it
- Quick-info*
- Word-completion*
- Method tip*
- Member-list popup*
- Haskell Console Application creation
- Haskell Console Application compilation (integrated with GHC)
- Haskell Console Application execution
- The presence of parse errors is indicated on-the-fly in the task list
(specific errors are still not specified)
- Error source location can be reached by double-clicking the task list
- Haskell Assignment Manager exercise creation and advertisement
- Haskell Assignment Manager exercise answering and submission
- Compilation checking (via GHC) and output checking of Haskell exercises by
Assignment Manager server

Please note that this first release of VHS has some known bugs:
- A VS.NET session can become unstable if you open a .hs file or create a
Haskell Console Application project.
- After opening a .hs file, the devenv.exe process is not being killed when
VS.NET exits.
- The above features marked with * sometimes do not work 100% as expected,
mainly if the haskell module under development has errors.
- Some features do not work in a "inter-module fashion".
- The Visual Haskell logo does not disappear from VS.NET splash screen after
uninstall.

Note: development of a Visual Studio plugin for Haskell has been proceeding
on two fronts.  Simon Marlow & Krasimir Angelov have been working on adding
complete editor support and a project framework integrated with Cabal,
whereas this release is based on a fork of the codebase several months ago,
and has a different feature set. We hope to combine these versions and make
further releases in the future.

Downloads, documentation and screenshots can be found in:
http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~haskell/vhs-am/
http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~haskell/vhs/

The VHS/VHS-AM team is:

- Simon Marlow
- Krasimir Angelov
- Andre Santos
- Andre Furtado
- Mauro La-Salette
- Marden Costa

This project was partially supported by a MS grant for extending the
Assignment Manager tool.