Provide source map data for web live preview tooling

[timheuer]

Improve source info/context details for web tooling

Web tooling is enabling new preview and design-mode capabilities in Visual Studio. Initial preview release supports ASP.NET Framework (https://aka.ms/weblivepreview) and we want to support ASP.NET Core projects as well. During initial design discussions we've identified with ASP.NET Core team some of the differences in mapping data/events we get from the framework and need some additional information from the ASP.NET Core runtime per discussions.

Our initial feedback has been to ensure we have support for ASP.NET Core (Razor) and Blazor project types. These may require different designs for Blazor, but we know we have some information already for ASP.NET Core that we need some additional context data.

[NTaylorMullen]

Costs break down are below for MVC & Razor Pages (not Blazor) if I did the work. Would be longer for someone with less context

• Update compiler tooling

  • Render Start/End contexts 3-4 days
    • Implicit expressions
    • Explicit expressions
    • TagHelpers
    • HTML literal content
  • Conditional generation ( we don't technically need to do this since we didn't in the past ) - 5 days
    • Update MSBuild SDK to pass in configuration status into Razor compiler
    • Flow debug configuration into compiler's parsing capabilities.
    • Only render start/end contexts if in debug configuration + runtime

• Update runtime

  • Update Begin/End context to utilize a DiagnosticSource to publish data. 2 - 5 days
  • Expose a public API for a ViewBuffer equivalent that WebLivePreview could depend on. 1 days
  • Create a "ViewBuffer" creation hook that gets hooked up at dev time every time we create a ViewBuffer 3-4 days

• Hot reload interactions

  • Needs to be evaluated

[mkArtakMSFT]

@timheuer is this still important given that Hot Reload is now supported in VS?

[ghost]

We've moved this issue to the Backlog milestone. This means that it is not going to be worked on for the coming release. We will reassess the backlog following the current release and consider this item at that time. To learn more about our issue management process and to have better expectation regarding different types of issues you can read our Triage Process.

[timheuer]

I think this compliments the HR experience still. Would like to keep the discussion alive on this /cc @sayedihashimi

[sayedihashimi]

Yes we would need this to be able to offer a designer type of experience.