Packages and Projects

C# projects are analogous to Node packages. When you add packages from Nuget (.NET's package registry), they get registered in the .csproj file. Likewise, when packages from NPM are added to a Node.js project, it is registered in package.json

To execute commands in a .csproj, we need to use declarative XML like this:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>net9.0</TargetFramework>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi" Version="9.0.0" />
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Extensions.ApiDescription.Server" Version="9.0.0">
      <IncludeAssets>runtime; build; native; contentfiles; analyzers; buildtransitive</IncludeAssets>
      <PrivateAssets>all</PrivateAssets>
    </PackageReference>
  </ItemGroup>

  <!--
    This property group contains the directives for generating the
    OpenAPI specification.
  -->
  <PropertyGroup>
    <!-- The output directory (placed one level up in this case) -->
    <OpenApiDocumentsDirectory>../openapi-spec</OpenApiDocumentsDirectory>
    <!-- The file name -->
    <OpenApiGenerateDocumentsOptions>--file-name api-spec</OpenApiGenerateDocumentsOptions>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <!-- This section is a set of post-build commands -->
  <Target Name="GenerateSpec" AfterTargets="Build" Condition="$(Configuration)=='Gen' Or $(GEN)=='true'">
    <Message Text="Generating OpenAPI schema file." Importance="high" />

    <!-- Generate TS bindings for the web app -->
    <Exec Command="yarn gen" WorkingDirectory="../vue-spa" />
  </Target>
</Project>

Like packages in a workspace in a typical TypeScript project, .NET projects can reference other local projects as well. We'll look at this in the next section.

You can learn more about the .csproj format in the documentation.