Bootstrap Process and Logging Improvements

[mdwigley]

Detailed Description

Improvements are needed in several key areas to enhance stability, maintainability, and developer experience:

• Logging: There is an opportunity to standardize and enhance logging throughout the bootstrap and plugin subsystems to improve observability and facilitate troubleshooting.
• Compatibility: Introducing a compatibility layer or abstraction to better support different UI platforms (such as WPF and Avalonia) would reduce code duplication and ease cross-platform development.
• Bootstrapper: The application startup and plugin bootstrap process could be refactored for clearer phased initialization, better error handling, and more robust configuration management.

Context

The plugin system becomes more maintainable, debuggable, and reliable with clearer error information and stable runtime behavior, especially during app startup. End users benefit from increased stability and clearer runtime diagnostics facilitating faster issue resolution. This change also prepares the architecture to support more complex plugin scenarios and easier future extensions while reducing risk from misconfigurations or partial plugin states.

Possible Implementation

• Consider introducing placeholder compatibility classes or abstractions to support cross-framework UI styling and reduce code conflicts.
• Improve plugin management interfaces with clearer documentation and streamlined method organization.
• Refactor the application bootstrap process to use scoped service providers for phased initialization, including plugin discovery, configuration application, and service registration.
• Enhance robustness by adding error handling and logging around configuration saves to prevent startup failures due to persistence issues.
• Standardize logging across bootstrap and plugin subsystems using consistent contextual tags to improve observability and diagnostics.
• Add detailed logging at key stages of plugin loading, registration, and UI integration to improve insight during application startup.
• Simplify plugin type filtering and registration logic to increase maintainability and performance.
• Apply consistent validation and argument checking to ensure code correctness and prevent runtime errors.

Related Issues

• None

Target Platform(s)

• All Platforms

Affected Components (optional)

• PlugHub Compatibility Layer (WPF/Avalonia bridging)
• PluginRegistrar and PluginService subsystems
• Bootstrapper initialization pipeline
• Configuration saving and logging subsystems
• UI composition plugins (styles, pages, settings)