SDK Development

Required tools and SDKs

To develop the NSwag toolchain, you need the following tools and SDKs:

• Visual Studio 2017
  • ".NET desktop development" workload (required for WPF projects [i.e. NSwagStudio])
  • "ASP.NET and web development" workload (required for ASP.NET projects)
  • ".NET Core cross-platform development" workload (required for .NET Core projects)
• The latest version of the .NET Core SDK
• (optional) Wix Toolset (required to build the MSI installer)
  • Wix Toolset Installer
  • Wix Toolset Visual Studio 2017 Extension
• (optional) NodeJS (required to build the NSwag.Npm package)
  • NodeJS Download

Execute from Visual Studio

There are two solutions:

• NSwag.sln: The complete solution with all frontends
  • The NSwagStudio.Installer project compiles the NSwag console binaries used by NSwagStudio
  • NSwagStudio only calls the console binaries, so the actual generators cannot be debugged when starting NSwagStudio
  • We recommend to create an nswag.json config file and test by starting NSwag.ConsoleCore with Project properties > Debug > Application arguments: run "path/to/my/nswag.json"
• NSwag.Min.sln: Contains only SDK-style projects without the NSwagStudio and NSwagStudio.Installer (much better performance)

Reference NJsonSchema with project references

The DTO classes (e.g. request/response classes) to JSON Schema conversion and code generation is implemented in NJsonSchema.

Often, a code change requires changes in NJsonSchema and NSwag and thus it is nice to have all libraries in one solution (i.e. resolve NuGet references to project references). For this I use the DotNetTools CLI commands switch-to-projects and switch-to-packages with the switcher.json config file. This only works in the NSwag.Min.sln solution.

Add a new runtime

• Update NSwagStudio nswag.cmd
• Add new enum value to NSwag.Commands.Runtime
• Add new target framework to NSwag.ConsoleCore project
• Add new runtime to the NSwagStudio.Installer project's build events
• See
  • https://github.com/RSuter/NSwag/pull/1799
  • https://github.com/RSuter/NSwag/commit/a732986d631466a715321bfa82039733e5652a90
  • https://github.com/RSuter/NSwag/commit/bf1e696cf423921f1b7be0bb27e4fe6c33a56c17

Release new version

• With Visual Studio Code search for the current version and replace with the new version
  • With the following file includes: *.csproj,*.nuspec,package.json,AssemblyInfo.cs
• Commit with the name v1.2.3, create a PR and merge into master, then into release