Create guidance: how to develop and run a C# build task with source in the local repo

[dagood]

From #96 (comment):

[@tmat] ... The root problem here seems to be the inability to build and use a task "dynamically". But we do have a similar ability - the build can run a C# script. We even ship csi task that runs a specified C# script . There are some issues there that need to be fixed to make it smooth, but that can be done.

Currently C# scripts do not support NuGet references (it's in the backlog, so maybe someday. However, that should be easy to work around. You can add those package references to the containing project and then access the binaries directly from the NuGet cache.

This repo should have a document about how we expect people to do this.

A side benefit is that we can have a consistent structure so moving the task to Arcade is painless.

[jcagme]

Is this still needed? I don't think we have C# scripts anywhere in arcade and haven't seen a lot of push or mentions about using them. Maybe I'm missing something around the original issue?

[dagood]

The ask is to have some way to run custom tasks, and C# scripts are a potential implementation of this request that was suggested in the linked issue (#96). I created this issue to broaden the request to include both (or more) methods.

I don't know how to find these efficiently, but at least a few repos build their own task DLLs to use in the build:

• Core-Setup: https://github.com/dotnet/core-setup/tree/5ff1240bef06a9a0a6544fcef93808ac26028e43/tools-local/tasks
• Toolset: https://github.com/dotnet/toolset/tree/bac6e8ce186ca9b67728e783d19641a22c36385e/src/toolset-tasks
• Core-SDK: https://github.com/dotnet/core-sdk/tree/24d26056ab254c5cbf70fe10d5227233e5dc890d/src/core-sdk-tasks

I still think it would be good to have some guidance and a documented on-ramp into the Arcade SDK (or an optional package built here). #96 has more details on this that haven't changed.