What additions/modifications of Roslyn metadata would be useful?

[michaelcfanning]

Starting ideas include:

1) Examine user-facing string patterns to ensure we properly capture scenarios with limited UI real estate (arguing for clear/concise output) while providing for more verbose, comprehensive output. 2) Add icons that surface to user to help differentiate analyzer source 3) tags vs. single categories 4) examine analyzer options/configurations 5) 'backlink' metadata to assist with sending telemetry directly to analyzer authors

[sharwell]

• It might be interesting to expose the NoCodeFixAttribute we use in StyleCop Analyzers.
• For code fixes, it could be interesting to declare the scope of potential changes in terms of the public API.
  • Does not make any API changes
  • Could make API changes, but not which are part of the public or internal¹ surface area
  • Could make API changes which are part of the internal surface area, but not which are part of the public surface area
  • Could make API changes to the public surface area
• It would be nice if code fixes could be marked as "usable in cleanup operations", where the IDE performs a series of Fix All operations to "clean up" a variety of violations at once. For example, all of the spacing rules in StyleCop Analyzers have "safe" code fixes which can be applied to any code base without breaking the code. It would be nice to fix all spacing violations at once rather than use up to 29 separate operations to cover each of the diagnostics in this category.
  • This could be further extended to automatically apply code fixes for diagnostics in this category when reformatting all or part of a document.

¹ The "public" surface area is types and members which are accessible from another assembly which references the assembly in a standard manner. The "internal" surface area is the surface area which is accessible to an assembly listed in an InternalsVisibleTo attribute.