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Provide a way to turn off Diagnostic Tracing in projects

See original GitHub issue

Today, tracing support is always enabled by default, unless it is overridden externally (to the project), for e.g., at the msbuild command-line. There seems to be no way - at least no easy way - to control this in a project.

https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/blob/bc5c514a45a1a900b71d39a3541196bc2cf1bb0d/src/Tasks/Microsoft.NET.Build.Tasks/targets/Microsoft.NET.Sdk.CSharp.props#L21-L24

This could be made opt-in by supplying a property - for e.g., EnableDiagnosticTracing - that’s true by default for compatibility purposes.

  <PropertyGroup>
    <DefineConstants Condition=" '$(DefineConstants)' != '' ">$(DefineConstants);</DefineConstants>
    <DefineConstants Condition="'$(EnableDiagnosticTracing)'!='false'">$(DefineConstants)TRACE</DefineConstants>
  </PropertyGroup>

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 3 years ago
Reactions:1
Comments:9 (5 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

2reactions

marcpopMSFTcommented, Dec 1, 2021

Moving this out of the props could be breaking if customers were overwriting that value. Something simpler than the regex like the below could be added to a targets file (probably in the CSHARP.targets file) based on a condition. If you’re interested in doing that work, we’d accept the PR.

$(DefineConstants.Replace('TRACE', ''))

1reaction

KalleOlaviNiemitalocommented, Dec 4, 2021

Visual Basic uses the DefineTrace property:

https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/blob/c53c8ac81e1bcb8118c31bc4f5622396c72e9959/src/Tasks/Microsoft.NET.Build.Tasks/targets/Microsoft.NET.Sdk.VisualBasic.props#L26-L32

https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/blob/4adc47707f27d0dce03cee9e4651d599e7ff265f/src/Tasks/Microsoft.VisualBasic.CurrentVersion.targets#L141

If DefineTrace in Visual Basic controls whether TRACE is added, and EnableDiagnosticTracing in C# controls whether TRACE is removed after having been added, it’s good that the properties have different names. Still, it is unfortunate if VB’s simpler mechanism cannot be used for C# because of compatibility.