Converts Saltarelle C# files and projects to TypeScript.
The history of this project starts in the early 2000s while I was working at Microsoft on the Excel Web Access project. I and my colleagues were tired of writing and maintaining a large code base in raw JavaScript. I started looking around for something to convert C# (which was our language of choice) into JavaScript and found the work of a fellow Microsoftie, Nikhil Kothari. He had written a tool called Script#. Over the course of a few months, our team ported our existing raw JavaScript into Script# code. We saw amazing productivity boosts since we could use Visual Studio and C#, which were quite a bit more evolved and robust than the JavaScript tools that were currently available. I also joined Nikhil Kothari's virtual Script# team to implement new features.
I left Microsoft at the end of 2009 and joined Tableau Software and repeated the same thing I had done at Microsoft - I helped port our existing raw JavaScript to Script#, and saw the same benefits that we had seen on Excel.
Eventually the Script# project was abandoned (when Nikhil left Microsoft for Google) and our team at Tableau moved to Saltarelle, which was designed to be a drop-in replacement for Script#, but added C# 5.0 language features.
In June 2015, Saltarelle was aquired by Bridge.NET but compatibility with Saltarelle was not a design goal for the new project. We at Tableau Software now faced a situation where we had a large code base using a compiler that was no longer supported. Additionally, new code within Tableau was being written predominately in TypeScript and we wanted a way to easily port our existing Saltarelle-based code to TypeScript. Hence, Desalt, written in my spare time over the course of several months.
The project is mostly working, but I don't yet have an entry point (either a CLI or an MSBuild task). I have an end-to-end test that runs over real code taken from our "Core" library at Tableau and am using that to implement features little by little.
In short, this is not ready for prime time yet, although it does quite a bit already. Here's a snapshot of a recent build with the C# on the left and the TypeScript on the right.
The remaining features are tracked here.