Package Status Indicators in Visual Studio. #11838
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I wasn't able to make today's meeting as it was scheduled outside of my working hours (I'm in Australia) and I haven't yet watched the recording, so apologies if these have already been discussed.
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| Hovering over the package and icon will display the respective information for the status. |
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Supporting tool tips in Solution Explorer would require work across three teams: in Solution Explorer (in its hierarchy provider), in CPS and in the .NET Project System.
Currently only tool tip text is displayable for source control provider status. The APIs would need to be extended to allow other kinds of data to be included in tool tips.
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| For the sake of not annoying developers, we should only bubble up a warning affordance to the top-level node (Packages and Dependencies) if there is a known top-level vulnerability or deprecated package in their package graph. |
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The current bubble-up logic is based on priority. At each level, the "maximum" level's icon is shown. The order is: error, warning, none. Doing something different here would require some rewriting within the dependencies tree.
| - Vulnerable - "This package has at least one vulnerability with `<severity category>` severity." | ||
| - Outdated - "This package has version `<latest version>` available. | ||
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| When right clicking a package, a developer should be able to get to the "Manager NuGet Packages..." context menu action like they can with the "Packages" and "Dependencies" nodes. |
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It would be great if we could have more targeted gestures in these menus for packages. "Manage" is vaguer than "See updates" or "See vulnerabilities".
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I see you've called this out under "Future Possibilities" below.
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| Because this feature may need some experimentation to get the right signal from the noise and the potential for exponential transitive-level vulnerabilities, developers will need a way to opt-out from the experience as a whole, and options to opt-in to varying levels of information. | ||
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| This may need to include a new options panel inside the `Projects and Solutions > SDK-Style Projects` regarding the Package Settings where there's a top-level checkbox for the feature, and either a drop-down indicating a package status level or multiple checkboxes for each status mentioned above. |
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We receive regular requests to make the Dependencies tree general purpose for other kinds of projects, so I try to not think of it as belonging to SDK-style projects, despite the .NET Project System team owning the feature. That said, I don't know offhand of a better options page for such a setting, nor do I think we want to add another page for just a single option.
| <!-- Why should we not do this? --> | ||
| While developers continue to seek this information in more locations, it can also be quite a bit of noise towards the general development experience. Developers tend to compare visual issues in the solution explorer akin to ["DLL Hell"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell) which we would like to avoid the perception as much as possible while providing valuable information about dependencies. | ||
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| This feature can potentially collide with existing experiences in which package dependencies may not exist on disk and/or assets file are incorrect and require a restore to resolve. There can also be false positives/negatives with the current state of the project system and the need to reload projects to refresh the package status in realtime. |
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Could you explain more about false positives that would require reloading projects? I'm not aware of such a situation, for projects opened by the .NET Project System at least.
| <!-- What lessons from other communities can we learn from? --> | ||
| <!-- Are there any resources that are relevant to this proposal? --> | ||
| - NuGet provides status indicators in the NuGet Package manager experience in Visual Studio. | ||
| - Visual Studio for Mac provides "outdated" status indicators in the solution explorer. |
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Can we include a screenshot of how this looks in VS Mac?
Introduction to an experience in Visual Studio in which a developer can view the current package statuses in the solution explorer.
This proposal introduces a concept of package status indicators in Visual Studio.
Rendered Spec
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