Failing fast to learn a lot

Im working on a language at the moment, which i’ll blog more on later. During the development I came to a point where I needed to actually create assembly files to test the result of the compiler. I’ve writte a few compilers using Reflection.Emit before and I’ve always come to a point where everything seems to be working fine. Using reflection I can see all the methods and all the classes but when I write it to file. There’s absolutely nothing but the manifest.

I seem to forget the trick everytime. If the module name is different from the filename it just wont work. I have actually no clue to why that is. But I had the problem today and with one single change namely making the module name the same as the file name, I solved the problem. If you don’t need to save your assemblies to disk, your basically free to choose the module name.