Proposal: Automatically generate Fusion (SxS) manifests for referenced WinMDs' ACIDs
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- Dominant language
- C#
- Stars
- 665
- Forks
- 134
- Avg merge
- 1d 3h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 32
Description
Summary
MSIX tools generate appxmanifest ACIDs (Activatable Class IDs) registrations for referenced WinMDs, but for unpackaged projects there's no such tooling to automate the process, and with the plans to make the dll searching fallback an opt-in feature unpackaged projects will have to either manually add the ACIDs for WinMDs they use to the Fusion manifest which is a tedious process or opt-in to use the dll searching fallback which is slower and increases the binary size, it also doesn't work for Out-of-Process classes, so the best solution here is to provide an opt-out feature to automate the process
Important Notes
There are 2 approaches to achieve this:
- Using
mt.exewith the-winmdflag to generate Fusion manifests (Preferred) - Using a custom MSBuild task that parses the referenced (
WindowsMetadataReferenceitems) WinMDs and generate a Fusuion manifest manually containing all classes found in the WinMDs
Open Questions
Should this be implemented in .NET SDK instead?
Additional Notes
I'm willing to implement this feature once approved
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by comparing the two proposed approaches: invoking mt.exe with the -winmd flag or implementing a custom MSBuild task that parses WindowsMetadataReference items. Resolve whether the feature belongs in CsWinRT or the .NET SDK, then define how referenced WinMD classes should produce Fusion manifests for unpackaged projects.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- csharp
- Domain
- build-system
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 30/100