I just spent 4 1/2h looking at ILASM, .NET Assemblies and the list of CLI instructions to get some "inspiration" for my own VM

I'd say that's a Sunday morning well spend^^

Generally speaking Microsoft's documentation has gotten extremely good.

Generally speaking.

I have projects that, at this point, would get considerable benefit from being able to write parts directly in IL. Sometimes this is for performance, sometimes this to be able to express things that are valid IL, but not expressable in C# or VB or F#. If you work a lot with language you probably know what I'm talking about.

Microsoft hasn't just not documented anything for doing serious IL development, they straight up haven't provided anything to make it easy. No IL projects. No IL syntax/intellisence in VS. Nada.

There is ILSupport, a third party extension which does offer this, even mixed language/IL projects which would be perfect for what I need.

Except Microsoft made a change in the newer SDK's which broke the extension. Where ildasm and ilasm use to be, isn't where it now is.

I'm working with the extension author to come up with a new solution but the lack of documentation and easy/reliable access to those tools is irritating.