Wasm/WASI tasks for MSBuild

EXPERIMENTAL

• MSBuild task is an unit of execution inside a build, that can be created by users of MSBuild

• experimental project exporing using Wasm/WASI to create MSBuild tasks

• Wasm/WASI supports multiple languages extending the notion of a MSBuild Task from a C# class to a Wasm module

  • Rust example tasks [examples/]

• The tasks run in a Wasm/WASI runtime - Wasmtime which sandboxes the execution from the rest of the system and files/directories a task allowed to touch have to be specified.

• see spec for details

• State: Proof of concept, will not be maintained, outcome is that the WASI ecosystem is not ready for productization in MSBuild (Aug 2024)

• Released as NuGet packages: MSBuildWasm, MSBuildWasm.Templates

User manual

Create a MSBuild task using Wasm/WASI toolchain.

1. install wasi-sdk, cargo, build the .dll for MSBuildWasm (e.g. by dotnet publish src)
2. copy rust_template from the examples folder and add your behavior to the lib.rs file, take care to specify the input/output parameters
3. compile with cargo build --release --target wasm32-wasi
4. in your project's project.csproj that you want to build with MSBuild include the task

   <UsingTask TaskName="MyWasmTask" AssemblyFile="MSBuildWasm.dll" TaskFactory="WasmTaskFactory">
   <Task>your_module.wasm</Task>
   </UsingTask>

5. use the task in a target

   <Target Name="MyWasmTarget" AfterTargets="Build">
   <MyWasmTask Param="StringParam" Param2="true">
     <Output TaskParameter="Result" PropertyName="TaskResult"/>
   </MyWasmTask>
   </Target>

6. dotnet build

Writing tasks for MSBuild

Developer manual

the spec elaborates how this package interplays with MSBuild and how to create a task

Running tests

see .github/workflows/dotnet.yml action

1. compile examples and template rust tasks to using cargo
2. dotnet test test/WasmTasksTests

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Third-party Licenses

This project includes software developed under the Apache License, Version 2.0: Wasmtime - https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime Wasmtime.Dotnet - https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime-dotnet

For full terms and conditions, please see the Apache 2.0 license.