Packaging and Distribution

Packaging for the ReSharper Platform is very similar to the way extensions were packaged for ReSharper 8 - it is recommended you familiarise yourself with that guide before continuing. An extension is distributed as a NuGet package, and hosted on a NuGet gallery. However, because ReSharper extensions are runtime code, rather than compile time dependencies, the use case for ReSharper extension packages is very different to standard NuGet packages. Because of this, they have a different file layout internally.

Instead of adding assembly references to the lib folder, ReSharper extensions should add all binaries to the DotFiles root folder inside the package. This is different to ReSharper 8, where the top level folder was ReSharper. This is because extensions are now extensions to the ReSharper Platform, rather than just to ReSharper. The top level folder name has changed to reflect this.

Also unlike ReSharper 8 packages, ReSharper Platform extension packages do not provide a folder for previous versions (e.g. ReSharper\v8.1, ReSharper\v8.2, etc.). ReSharper 8.x packages tended to be updated in a timely manner for new versions of ReSharper, and maintaining previous versions in a package became unnecessary and a maintenance overhead for plugin authors, if they chose to do it at all. This means binaries should be copied to the DotFiles folder directly.

This has an impact on dependencies - any dependent assemblies included in the extension package will be copied to the main installation directory, too, so it is easy to see how clashes can occur. Dependencies should either be ILMerge’d into the main extension, or ideally, added as NuGet package dependencies. However, the installer cannot handle dependencies which have more than one copy of the same assembly - for example, if adding xunit.dll using the xunit NuGet package, the installer does not know which copy to take, the one in lib\net45, lib\portable, etc. JetBrains currently uses private dependency packages that only contain a single copy of the assembly to work around this limitation.

The package must also add a dependency to the package called “Wave”. This is the package that represents the core version of the ReSharper Platform. For ReSharper 9.0, this is Wave 1.0, so the dependency should be added as Wave [1.0]. Without this dependency, when the package will not be added to the correct feed on the extensions gallery, and won’t be visible in the Extension Manager.

Extensions can include settings and annotations files, by including the files in a folder in the format DotFiles\Extensions\{packageId}\annotations\ or DotFiles\Extensions\{packageId}\settings\, where {packageId} is the full ID of the package, e.g. DotFiles\Extensions\CitizenMatt.Xunit\annotations\xunit.xml or DotFiles\Extensions\CitizenMatt.Xunit\settings\template.dotSettings. These files are copied directly, with the same folder structure into the main installation directory. This folder structure is intended to prevent name clashes. If the folder name under DotFiles\Extensions does not match the package ID directly (case insensitive), then the files will not be loaded.