microsoft / microsoft/MSBuildSdks

Need better documentation on how to build custom SDKs, including with NoTargets

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Dominant language
C#
Stars
508
Forks
94
Avg merge
6h 40m
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Description

I'm a 25-year .NET veteran, and I spent the day vibe-coding a new SDK to let you edit Documentation inside Visual Studio.

Getting it to work was a clusterf***.

It appears that there is very little documentation on how to build your own SDKs, including how to build functionality that relies on other SDKs (including NoTargets).

After dozens of iterations and failures, we finally got a version to work that imported the Microsoft.Build.NoTargets NuGet package into the file, and then copied the targets into MY NuGet package. No other permutation worked.

I've had the same problem trying to build Roslyn generators, there is very little documentation on how to build the NuGet packages when you have dependencies.

With the advent of AI, this problem can be easily solved. Please point Claude Code at the codebase and have it write better docs. It would greatly help us all. Thanks!

Contributor guide

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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

The issue does not identify specific documentation files, tests, or entry points. Review the existing SDK documentation and examples first, then define coverage for custom SDKs, SDK dependencies, NoTargets, and Roslyn generator packages; done means a newcomer can follow the documented build and packaging steps successfully.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
csharp
Domain
build-system, documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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