Details about the issue with PostSharp and Paket

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
  initial steps to prepare a demo project for this issue

• Problem
  describes the issue in detail

• Conclusion
  summary of the issue and conjecture of the root cause

• Workarounds and tracking the solving efforts
  audits the solutions hints and efforts to solve the issue

Prerequisites

1. Create a new project with an empty class named ClassUsingPostSharp

2. Add via NuGet the package PostSharp.Patterns.Common

3. Add a new integer property named Counter and put the PostSharp RangeAttribute on it

   [Range(1, 7)]
   public int Counter { get; set; }

4. Add via NuGet the package xUnit

5. Add a unit-test for the functionality of PostSharp
   by verifying whether an exception is thrown when the Counter property is set to a value outside the given range

6. Run the unit-test to check that everything is green

7. Add Paket in Magic Mode

8. Run paket convert-from-nuget

9. Run the unit-test to check that everything is still green

   • also after closing and re-opening Visual Studio this is still the case
   • also after Clean Solution, Rebuild Solution

10. put all files under source control

    • use a reasonable .gitignore for Visual Studio projects
    • that was done by each step in this repo here)

Problem

1. Verify with git status that nothing was forgotten

2. Run git clean -dxf to cleanup all intermediate outputs somewhere in the developing tree

3. Run the unit-test again and now it is red!

4. Add via NuGet the package PostSharp.Patterns.Common

5. Run the unit-test again and now it is back green

6. With git status you see that only the file src/PostSharpAndPaket/PostSharpAndPaket.csproj was modified

7. With git reset --hard we take back the changes to ensure a clean workspace (from git perspective)

8. Run the unit-test again and this time it is still green

9. Again we get back the issue by running git clean -dxf

Conclusion

• This means, that something under the hood in the obj, bin, .. folder is necessary for PostSharp.
• The same issue a co-worker and the CI server will have.

Who can help?

Workarounds and tracking the solving efforts

Easier access to build and run

Hint: for all commands below open a Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio and navigate to the project root folder

Build via CLI

• run build with

  msbuild .\src\PostSharpAndPaket\PostSharpAndPaket.sln
  

xUnit Console Runner

• with commit 56444b ("add xUnit console runner") the xUnit Console Runner was included

• so from root we can now run the unit tests via

  .\packages\xunit.runner.console\tools\net472\xunit.console.exe .\src\PostSharpAndPaket\bin\Debug\PostSharpAndPaket.dll
  

Paket commands

• (re-) install packages after changing paket.dependencies file

  .paket\paket.exe install
  

• restoring package folder after cleanup DevTree or switching branches

  .paket\paket.exe restore
  

Hint from Daniel Balas (comment: 103888639_58799413)

• Paket throws the warning Could not detect any platforms from 'unzipper' in '...\packages\PostSharp\build\unzipper\SharpCompress.dll', please tell the package authors

• to check which versions of PostSharp have this issue the branch dev/play-with-postsharp-versions was created (also pushed to remote here)

• indeed the version 5.0.55 doesn't throw this warning

• all later versions (the 6er line) have that issue