dotnet / dotnet/project-system

*Please* provide public documentation for CPS

Open
#6,725 4 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Documentation Triage-No-Action
Dominant language
C#
Stars
1k
Forks
415
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Currently, there is no public documentation for how to use CPS to create or extend project types. As I have indicated in previous issues, the VSProjectSystem repo is dead as a doornail (it has not been committed to since March, and issues there are ignored by MS contributors). When I saw “for more information, consult our private repository” in #6724, which introduces public documentation, I became most irritated.

The CPS NuGet packages on nuget.org provide some API in the form of IntelliSense member-documentation XML files. This is the only documentation I can find _anywhere_ for how to use CPS. Unfortunately, those NuGet packages have not been updated since June 2019. Newer versions of CPS are only distributed in a (supposedly) public NuGet feed hosted in Azure DevOps, but it is clear that the feed is really intended for MS-internal use only. (I don’t even know which NuGet feed it is, as there are [several listed](https://github.com/dotnet/project-system/blob/ce4a68d896a468bf936057a719debee38ca97085/build/import/Packages.targets#L7-L19)).

I (and others) have asked this question multiple times in the past; usually all we get in response is crickets. To put it bluntly, I am **sick and tired** of MS ignoring our community input. Over the past few months or so, Microsoft’s open source projects have become just one big “Please wait, announcement coming soon” sign. (Project Reunion — big talk, little code, and there has been zero progress towards making that code usable without major modifications. WinUI 3 — neither talk nor code in recent memory. Furthermore, the CsWinRT component used alongside WinUI 3 is now incompatible with it. The only response given as to how to fix that is “use WinUI 3 preview 3” — except that preview 3 has not been released to anyone outside MS. And so on.)

I could have filed this issue in a number of repos across Microsoft, but I am filing it here because the “see private repository” comment is the straw that broke my camel’s back. **Please** do something about this. Thank you.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.