PC World posted a news story that Microsoft will release a CTP (Community Technology Preview) of a new type of compiler its researchers have been building

This project is about revising what compilers do," said Anders Hejlsberg in a talk at Microsoft's Build conference, being held this week in Anaheim, California. "[It] is about opening the compiler and making all that information available so [the developer] can harness all of this knowledge," he said.

Roslyn is a compiler for C3 and Visual Basic with a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that developers can use to fine-tune their code. It resembles a model developed by Miguel de Icaza's Mono Project, in which the information the compiler generates about a program can be reused as a library.

  Microsoft Previews Compiler-as-a-Service Software