tl;dr: FubuCsProjFile is a new library from the fubu community for manipulating Visual Studio.Net project files and a new composable templating engine.
The FubuMVC community was busy last year building all new functionality for build automation, documentation generation, and project templating. What we haven’t done yet is actually talk about what we were doing in any kind of way that might make it possible for other folks to kick the tires on all that stuff. This blog post and the heavily under construction website at http://fubuworld.com is an attempt to change that.
For a couple years we’ve had a couple one-off pieces of code to manipulate csproj files with raw Xml manipulation copied over some of our tooling. When we started to get serious about rebuilding the “fubu new” functionality, we knew that we first needed a more serious way to add, query, remove, and modify items in .csproj files and .sln files. I looked around for prior art, but found little besides the MSBuild libraries themselves which — shockingly! — did not work in Mono (wouldn’t even compile as I recall). Fortunately, Monodevelop has very robust MSBuild manipulation code with all kinds of care taken to avoid unnecessary merge problems by maintaining line breaks and file formatting. Because it has a permissive license, I mostly copied the csproj manipulation code out of Monodevelop and wrapped a little bit prettier object model around their very low level API.
On top of the csproj file manipulation, I added a hack-y class for adding and removing projects from Visual Studio.Net solution files and a from scratch templating engine we use heavily from our “fubu new” functionality.
We certainly don’t yet support every single thing you can do in a csproj file, but we’re already using FubuCsProjFile within Bottles to attach embedded resources, inside the forthcoming Ripple 3.0 release for querying and manipulating assembly references, and as part of the prototype functionality inside of the fubu.exe tool for generating Spark or Razor views.
FubuCsProjFile is available on Nuget under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. We have received some reports that FubuCsProjFile has some unit tests that break on Mono (“\” instead of “/”, Unix vs. Windows line breaks, the normal stuff). That’ll get resolved soon-ish, but that just means that I can’t claim that it will work flawlessly on Mono/*nix right now.
The Shade Tree Developer 