ILSpy Developer Meeting 2020, Virtual Edition

[christophwille]

Previous dev meetings are documented in #1584 and #1321. This time. we meet from Thursday morning till Sunday noon. If you are interested in coming and contributing to ILSpy, please let me know.

Currently planning to come: @dgrunwald @siegfriedpammer @christophwille

[christophwille]

@cshung @jacdavis as we will be working late anyways, this might be a good opportunity for calls too.

[christophwille]

First weekend notes.

• Assembly resolver: document and improve 4f8c588
• Attributes on local functions #2077 included for v6.1
• Fix in VSIX for Upgrade ILSpy.exe to System.Reflection.Metadata 1.8.1 #2044 (caused MissingMethodException for GetDocumentIdsWithFilePath()). Put ILSpy into subdirectory and DO NOT reuse assemblies from ILSpy. See 7578305
• C# language support status #829 updated with C# 9.0 features (native integers and attributes on local functions will ship in v6.1). Internal csharp9notes.txt
• RFC: Joining the .NET Foundation #1525 will remain open but won't be pursued atm
• Nullability in ICSharpCode.Decompiler: too much work for too little gain.
• Work on deconstruction-pattern-matching-foundation branch (issue Feature Discussion: Patterns #2048 and Tuples deconstructing support #1832)

TODOs

• @siegfriedpammer .NET Core app opens reference assembly #2076 for v6.1
• @siegfriedpammer open issue in dotnet runtime repo re: "how to properly identify net5.0 assemblies" (tfm, file version, file info version - what in which order, is there a system to the madness?)
• @christophwille GH Actions to auto-lock closed issues older than 3 months

[christophwille]

Second & final weekend notes:

• Work on deconstruction-pattern-matching-foundation branch commenced. Progress is tracked via Tuples deconstructing support #1832 (comment). Final TODOs:
  • Add more unit tests @siegfriedpammer
  • Implement var (a, b) = ...; @siegfriedpammer and @dgrunwald
  • Bug report Deconstruction assignment of expressions involving array access produces unexpected results dotnet/roslyn#46864 has been filed (array elements assignment)
• csharp9notes.txt updated with sections on
  • ranking C#9 features by implementation effort (small-ish ones)
  • < C#9 features that are widely used & still missing in ILSpy
  • < C#9 features that are small-ish (one of those, Disposable ref struct, implemented via dab7096)
  • Existing features that need to be expanded
• (Most) C# 9.0 feature development is put on the back burner until it matures more
• wrong string switch #2101 discussed, @siegfriedpammer has notes on fixing. [UI]Need a little more height or an scoll bar for new options #2107 discussed, ScrollViewer for Display tab.
• C#9 Top-level statements has been marked as won't implement in C# language support status #829 (mostly because of the trouble we'd have to go to for displaying something appropriate in the tree view as well as other navigation issues)
• External script calls (update-assemblyinfo & sort-resx) have been optimized to reduce build time

TODOs

• We decided that we want to reformat the whole code base. Tool to be evaluated is https://github.com/dotnet/format. Coding standards decisions will be by @dgrunwald.
• Productivity Power Tools recommendation for contributors https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualStudioPlatformTeam.ProductivityPowerPack2017. Especially Shrink Empty Lines and Power Commands (feature: Format document on save).
• The next version of ILSpy will be 6.2-preview1 (time frame roughly end of month++)