microsoft / microsoft/CsWinRT

Proposal: Automatically generate Fusion (SxS) manifests for referenced WinMDs' ACIDs

Open
#2,031 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

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.exe with the -winmd flag to generate Fusion manifests (Preferred)
  • Using a custom MSBuild task that parses the referenced (WindowsMetadataReference items) 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

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. 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

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.