[API Proposal]: Add parameter-less and reflection-less AddUserSecrets via source generator

[kzu]

Background and motivation

Currently, AddUserSecrets relies on doing reflection to read the assembly-level attribute emitted via MSBuild.

This makes the consuming API less intuitive, since you have to pass either a type (which one? what for? not obvious) or an assembly (leaky implementation detail).

The user secrets ID property could be made visible to the compiler and a source generator could emit a parameterless AddUserSecrets that already had the right string in place.

API Proposal

namespace Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration;

    public static class UserSecretsConfigurationExtensions
    {
        public static IConfigurationBuilder AddUserSecrets(this IConfigurationBuilder configuration)
            where T : class
            => configuration.AddUserSecrets("[$(UserSecretsId) via MSBuild])", optional: true, reloadOnChange: false);

API Usage

configuration.AddUserSecrets();

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[gfoidl]

User secrets are meant to be only used for development, so a source generator will be overkill for this and just slows down compilation.

makes the consuming API less intuitive

What consuming APIs do you have in mind? Usual consumption is via the configuration model, and no user code is needed for it to read the values.

[tarekgh]

I agree with @gfoidl —this is a development-mode feature and not intended for production use. Given that, I don't believe it's worth the added effort or the impact on compilation performance.