dotnet/roslyn

Incremental Generators documentation is missing information about project setup (and more)

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#75798 opened on Nov 7, 2024

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Description

I was searching the web for SourceGenerators and came across the Incremental Generators which seem to replace the SourceGenerators.

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/features/incremental-generators.md https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/features/incremental-generators.cookbook.md

I found it exceedingly hard to create a working generator project with a consumer project that uses the generated code in VS. Thinking of developers that have not yet worked with generators before I guess the main problem is that this documentation only provides information about the in depth logic that can be used once a generator is all setup (Pipeline, IncrementalValuesProvider, creating a NuGet package, ...), but it misses the important part of how to actually setup the project for the generator and how to reference the generator project in a consumer project to use the generated code.

I would love to see the documentation to be accessible for new developers that have not worked with SourceGenerators / have no prior knowledge on the subject.

Information I'd like to see to improve this:

  • How should the Generator csproj look like?
  • What's the minimum of properties and references I need?
  • How do I reference the project correctly in my consumer project?
  • How can I debug my generator?

Information sources that can help improve the documentation:

VS needs to be restarted when generating code

I found multiple issues that gave me ideas on what might be the issue. Looks like VS has a pretty long standing issue with generated code. https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/49249 https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/48083 After this ordeal I tried the same project in Rider and it does not have any of these issues. Would be great to have a sentence in the documentation about restarting VS after generating code until that issue is fixed.

A comment on an issue currently is the best "getting started" documentation

After reading a lot of issues and blogs online I also found this comment in one of the previously mentioned issues: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/49249#issuecomment-2226975890 which was the best source for the kind of information I was lacking and I'd strongly recommend including most, if not all of this information in the documentation,

A random text on github is the documentation for debugging a generator

Also regarding debugging the generator I randomly found this text on github which works wonderfully https://github.com/JoanComasFdz/dotnet-how-to-debug-source-generator-vs2022 - which I also propose to include in the documentation somehow.

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