Roslyn VS MSBuild

Recently, while creating some experimental C# source code generators (xafero/csharp-generators), I was just concatenating strings together. Like you do, you know, if things have to go very quickly. If you have a simple use case, use a formatted multi-line string or some template library like scriban. But I searched for a way to generate more and more complicated logic easily - like for example, adding raw SQL handler methods to my pre-generated DBSet-like classes for my ADO.NET experiment. You could now say: Use Roslyn and that's really fine if you look everything up in a website like SharpLab, which shows immediately the syntax tree of our C# code.

At runtime, the Case C# expressions are embedded into a function and dynamically compiled into an assembly using the Roslyn C# compiler. Then the function that contains the expression is called (e.g. CaseAvailableFunction.Availablle()). At runtime, the function provides various methods to access stored case values as well as the current input data.

I like to use the roslyn coding practices for C# projects (https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/wiki/Contributing-Code.md)

I did get confirmation that the actual kill has been postponed to .Net 9.0 rather than .Net 8.0 . However, that PR is factually wrong regarding when System.Runtime.Serialization use became opt-in -- I had to counter-adjust Rogue Survivor Revived to opt into using System.Runtime.Serialization for .Net 7.0, last November i.e. Nov 2022.

Like this https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/blob/d0060335c1fb2f0523b1cf4656c464c5c4316783/src/Framework/NativeMethods.cs

Here is a taste of what to expect: https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild

The main thing they do is to list projects so that you can open a solution and see a set of projects, or build a solution and build everything there. They also give a lot of customization and fortunately it's rare that you need to know anything about that. It does feel somewhat unnecessary since you should be able to open a project with its dependencies. Hopefully solution files are going to be cleaned up: https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/issues/1730

Since the previous check, the project has grown a lot. Our analyzer has become more advanced, too. This only makes this task more interesting! Despite the high quality of the MSBuild product and the well-known name of its creator, we again managed to find some issues in MSBuild's source code. The project is almost entirely written in C#. You can see it on GitHub. We took the code from this commit.

relevant github issue: https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/issues/1730

msbuild is the "make" system, but for .Net. Those .csproj files are just makefiles by another name. Also, msbuild is not Windows-only. The readme specifically states that it can run on Unix (and Unix-like) systems that support .Net Core.

You can't do without source files when you want to better understand what is happening "under the hood" of a particular system. For example, do you want to improve your understanding of how types from the standard library work? The source code of .NET Framework and .NET will help you to do that. Do you want to dig deeper into the compiler? No problem - here is the Roslyn's source code at your service. Do you need to look inside the build system? Here you go - the MSBuild code is also open-source. By the way, if you are interested in build processes, you may also find MSBuild Structured Log Viewer useful. It's a tool that allows you to work with MSBuild build logs in a convenient format.