ILSpy developer meeting in Stuttgart 2019-09-27 to 2019-09-29

[christophwille]

We are hosting a second dev meeting this year, again in Stuttgart like in February #1321 from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening.

If you are interested in coming and contributing to ILSpy, please let me know.

Currently planning to come: @dgrunwald @siegfriedpammer @Rpinski @christophwille

[jogibear9988]

I plan also

[christophwille]

This post is intended to list some of the ideas for work at our dev meeting this weekend.

A main theme for ILSpy 6 is "Make the UI Great Again". Work on this has started already, the icons/high dpi work has already been merged. Further topics are (finally) merging new tooltips #1654 and metadata feature #1716, as well as work on docking support (superseding PR #1276). (menu in title bar & dark theme support won't make the cut most likely)

The VS Addin will likely require a 5.0.1 for some of the recent navigation issues. With that, I'd like to bring @Rpinski repo with tests over to our org (Update: already done see https://github.com/icsharpcode/ILSpy-Addin-tests), and add test plans (like a minimal BVT, and more extended testing steps). Maybe also look into the new project format for VSIX, and the analyzer warnings.

An administrative topic #1525 is to be discussed, maturity ladder to be verified against our repo, and have the maintainers (asnychronously on the issue) vote for "Would you support joining dotnetfdn & sign the CA"

Decompiler engine / new language features: this will be @dgrunwald and @siegfriedpammer area with definitely discussions across the board on all missing language features. @siegfriedpammer has an ordered hard->easy list with preferences.

My items for discussion:

• POC for NetCore3App #1717 with respect to "beyond net472"
• Self Decompilation #1587 Self decompilation, how would you really trace what's going wrong? Would adding "narrow" unit tests help instead of "pipeline" tests (which I'd call "integration tests"). Good investment, pros/cons?
• Performance tests / profiling
• Spike (volunteers outside the core contributors?): export metadata to eg litedb and see if you can combine the data in an interesting way. Could be a feature in itself ("export for analysis") or a test bed to move SQL-tested useful features back to the C# code base
• Add pinned issue "Up for grabs" linking to all issues/features we'd like contributions for
• Close Strong Naming Yes/No? #1670 (maybe related to POC for NetCore3App #1717 now?)
• "custom async" in UI
• That one regularly failing unit test on AppVeyor... https://ci.appveyor.com/project/icsharpcode/ilspy/build/job/83q5uw5vhaolta3s
• README - build requirements. What are now really our min reqs? netcore3... (frontends.sln target 2.1, but that never figured in the req list)
• Go thru last two pages of issues and close as Won't fix if it is near 100% we'll never get around to it
• Bookmarks feature (but that is on @siegfriedpammer list anyways)

[siegfriedpammer]

I would like to add the following to the list:

• Language features: Pattern Matching, Deconstruction, Discards
• Find a solution for New code pattern for string concatenation #1691
• Triage Feature / Architecture Discussion: Ref #1151
• Architecture: C# AST rewrite Implement CheckInvariant for C# AST #1634
• Architecture: ILReader Performance idea: ILReader / type system #1203 and ILReader gets implicit conversions subtly wrong #901
• Better Code navigation based on When navigating to an overridden virtual method from the overriding derived class, navigate to the overridden method #819 (comment)
• Tab completion in search
• NuGet Packages as first-class citizens

[christophwille]

@siegfriedpammer also showcased "jitasm" PoC. Plan: take the code, implement as plugin (not in main ILSpy), have a "Yes, jitasm this assembly" button before invoking jitasm (opt-in once per asm) - because static ctors will be executed.

[dgrunwald]

What we actually did:

• Discussed some of the stuff listed above
• Fixed a whole bunch of bugs
• Merged some PRs with changes to the UI
  • e.g. using AvalonDock, which in the future will be extended for a tabbed UI
• Updated Roslyn version used for tests and added support for .NET Core 3 in our test infrastructure
• Implemented a few C# 8.0 features:
  • async streams
  • default interface members
  • readonly methods

There will be a 5.0.1 release soon with some of the bug fixes.
But proper support for C# 8 (including a bunch of bug fixes for the nullable reference type support) are only on master (=ILSpy 6).