Contributing overview

Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL) for .NET welcomes new contributors. This document will guide you through the process.

Contributor License agreement

Please visit https://cla.microsoft.com/ and sign the Contributor License Agreement. You only need to do that once. We can not look at your code until you've submitted this request.

Fork

Important node: Because Nuget brings very long assemblies file names, you'd want to clone MSAL.NET in a folder which has a short name and is very close to the root of your hard drive (for instance C:\msal).

Fork the project on GitHub and check out your copy.

Setup, Building and Testing

Please see the Build & Run wiki page.

Decide on which branch to create

Now decide if you want your feature or bug fix to go into the current stable version or the next version of the library.

Bug fixes for the current stable version need to go to 'master' branch.

In case of doubt, open an issue in the issue tracker.

Especially do so if you plan to work on a major change in functionality. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing your hard work go to waste because your vision does not align with our goals for the SDK.

Branch

Okay, so you have decided on the proper branch. Create a feature branch and start hacking:

$ git checkout -b my-feature-branch 

Commit

Make sure git knows your name and email address:

$ git config --global user.name "J. Random User"
$ git config --global user.email "j.random.user@example.com"

Writing good commit logs is important. A commit log should describe what changed and why. Follow these guidelines when writing one:

1. The first line should be 50 characters or less and contain a short description of the change prefixed with the name of the changed subsystem (e.g. "net: add localAddress and localPort to Socket").
2. Keep the second line blank.
3. Wrap all other lines at 72 columns.

A good commit log looks like this:

fix: explaining the commit in one line

Body of commit message is a few lines of text, explaining things
in more detail, possibly giving some background about the issue
being fixed, etc etc.

The body of the commit message can be several paragraphs, and
please do proper word-wrap and keep columns shorter than about
72 characters or so. That way `git log` will show things
nicely even when it is indented.

The header line should be meaningful; it is what other people see when they run git shortlog or git log --oneline.

Check the output of git log --oneline files_that_you_changed to find out what directories your changes touch.

Rebase

Use git rebase (not git merge) to sync your work from time to time.

$ git fetch upstream
$ git rebase upstream/v0.1  # or upstream/master

Test

Bug fixes and features should come with tests. Add your tests in the test directory. This varies by repository but often follows the same convention of /src/test. Look at other tests to see how they should be structured (license boilerplate, common includes, etc.).

Before you can run tests you will need to enable Skip Verification for on your machine. Open the 'Developer Command Prompt for VS2017' as an administrator and run the following command:

sn -Vr *,31bf3856ad364e35

Make sure that all tests pass.

Push

$ git push origin my-feature-branch

Go to https://github.com/username/microsoft-authentication-library-for-dotnet and select your feature branch. Click the 'Pull Request' button and fill out the form.

Pull requests are usually reviewed within a few days. If there are comments to address, apply your changes in a separate commit and push that to your feature branch. Post a comment in the pull request afterwards; GitHub does not send out notifications when you add commits.