Complete Support for .NET

[lukehoban]

.NET is broadly supported in preview as of Pulumi 1.5 🎉

This issue tracks remaining work to complete the support for .NET.

Done:

• Provide API to merge two instances of InputMap<T> (PR #3485)
• Can we add an indexer to output lists? (cosmosAccount.ConnectionStrings[0]) PR #3481
• Add a more descriptive error message if somebody tries to run a Pulumi program with dotnet run. Now it complains about missing PULUMI_MONITOR env var. (PR #3479)
• Enable "nullable" support in our resource packages. (PRs pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge#69 pulumi/pulumi-terraform#514)
• Aliases (PR #3420)
• Mixins: SAS tokens for storage (PR pulumi/pulumi-azure#408).
• Add .NET Examples to tests (pulumi/examples#475)
• Add Kubernetes codegen support (pulumi/pulumi-kubernetes#863)
• Add icons to provider NuGet packages (PR pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge#84 pulumi/pulumi-terraform#513)
• StackReference (PR #3511)
• Docker provider (docker.Image PR pulumi/pulumi-docker#115 examples pulumi/examples#482)
• Make it easy to log an exception. #3399 (comment) PR #3602

In progress:

• Add .NET tests to provider repos
• Apply improved namespace naming to all other providers (except AWS, Azure, AzureAD).
• Set the csproj file name to the project name when created from a template (CLI change done, templates to be changed)

Need review:
(none)

TODO:

• API docs at https://www.pulumi.com/docs/reference/pkg/.
• Add Windows test coverage for some subset of .NET examples
• add the work for TerraformRemoteState in pulumi-terraform
• Mixins: ArchiveFunctionApp.
• Testing Pulumi .NET programs - example, blog, any required support in the library
• Get rid of Serilog dependency, use MS logging extensions

Investigate/design/think:

• Add support for the new language to tf2pulumi
• Dynamic Providers
• Commit version.txt to git with some sensible version in it to make it easy to compile and run .NET SDKs without running any other tasks from make. (contributor experience)
• #3399 (comment). Can we get off of using static state. Perhaps have the instance state computed and passed into the RunAsync method as an appropriate context. Note: inputs/outputs are difficult here as they look at state like IsPreview and don't always have a clear way to determine that value.
• Use MEF and switch to a plugin model instead of an exe model. This would allow dep-injection to be used by clients and would lead to a more natural way of exposing the user's 'Stack' with attributes intead of with them having a Main method which bounces in and back from Pulumi.
• Clean things up between Stack and ComponentResource. #3399 (comment)
• Investigate 'lifting' on .net outputs like we do with JS outputs: #3399 (comment) Related: #3481 (comment)
• First class unknowns: #3399 (comment)
• Callback serialization
• Should we allow arbitrary objects to be exported from a stack? We could convert them to POCOs and export those (like we do with js/ts/python).
• Attach a debugger to the .NET program
• what is our SxS story. What are best practices in .NET. Will we need shudder binding redirects? #3450 (comment)
• Enable running pulumi up on precompiled binaries in case people want to split the compilation from execution #3509
• F#-idiomatic API
• PowerShell support #3473 #3507

Parked:

• namespaces for all the parts of a package resource. i.e. we have Pulumi.Aws, Pulumi.Aws.S3, pulumi.Aws.S3.Inputs, etc. Do we need/want all of these? Is it an acceptable usre experience (both for intellisense and docs)? etc. etc.
• Should our invokes allow async-inputs, or only sync-values? ts specifies only snyc values. js-impl allows async values. etc. etc.