Consider unifying the list of assemblies included in the razor compilation with the of assembly parts of the application.

[javiercn]

Right now application part manager is used for controller discovery, view component discovery and tag helper discovery (when doing AddTagHelpersAsServices()). However the assemblies included in the razor compilation are hard to configure. https://github.com/aspnet/Mvc/blob/dev/src/Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Razor/RazorViewEngineOptions.cs#L20

We could use application parts in order to define the list of assemblies to include as part of the compilation, this makes it easier to configure the list of assemblies that are part of the compilation (by just adding them to the list of application parts and having a feature that discovers them) and provides a single source of truth for configuring what assemblies are part of the application.

[Eilon]

Sounds quite intriguing. @javiercn can you chat with @rynowak @NTaylorMullen @pranavkm briefly to think this through?

[javiercn]

Discussed this with @pranavkm and seems like a good match. @rynowak suggested a quick design meeting for this.

[Eilon]

Cool.

[javiercn]

We had a quick discussion about this offline. We'll introduce a new application feature to represent compilation assets and populate it at the same time the application manager is created.

[rynowak]

/cc @davidfowl - I think you were interested in this

[pranavkm]

I had a chat with @davidfowl offline and his suggestion was to not create a separate list for this - just reuse the assembly part we already have. b3618f4 was a design based on that change.

[DmitrySikorsky]

This would be really great feature!