VS Code – forcing partial IntelliSense support for Cake scripts

1. Introduction

I’ve been using Cake for quite some time now, and I really like this tool, however the more complex my build scripts are, the more painful lack of IntelliSense is. Inspired a bit by this post, I decided to see what it takes to enable at least partial IntelliSense for Cake scripts in Visual Studio Code.

2. Investigation

The proper way of providing the code completion for Cake scripts would probably be a plugin to Omnisharp-Roslyn, as Cake script is basically a valid c# snippet. Unfortunately, at this moment Omnisharp-Roslyn doesn’t have plugin infrastructure ready, that is why I decided to go with a bit different path. As you might or might not be aware, VS Code already supports csx files, so if you add an empty project.json file (by empty I mean file with empty JSON object) to your build directory and change extension of your scripts to csx, you will immediately get a C# syntax highlighting and some IntelliSense support. Sadly this will not provide code completion for Cake method aliases. The reason why it fails on that is the fact that the Cake alias is ICakeContext extension method

but you use it as it was written as

The Cake engine generates additional alias overloads during script compilation, and as these overloads exist only on runtime, VS Code just can’t “see” them.

3. My approach

Having in mind the way Cake works I decided to write an application which would be able to take any Cake or Cake add-in and produce a library containing proper alias overloads. For instance, if original Cake method looks as follows

the application will rewrite it into

The algorithm looks more or less like that

  • Retrieve Cake or Cake add-in via NuGet
  • Scan an assembly and find all classes containing alias methods
  • Use CSharpCodeGenerationService to generate metadata for Cake alias methods
  • Parse generated code with Roslyn and produce SyntaxTree
  • Append Metadata suffix to classes containing alias method
  • Remove ICakeContext parameter from alias method
  • Generate dummy body for methods which require that (methods which have return type or which have out parameters)
  • Update xml documentation
  • Compile generated code and produce dll

There is no point of doing more detailed description in here so if you want to take a closer look here is source code.

4. Generating metadata libraries

Before we start “hacking” VS Code to have IntelliSense, we have to prepare metadata libraries which will contain all necessary Cake alias overloads. In order to do that grab the application from NuGet and generate Cake.Common and Cake.Core metadata libraries. The simplest way of doing it is to run these commands

As a result, the application will produce following files:

  • Cake.CommonMetadata.dll
  • Cake.CommonMetadata.xml
  • Cake.CoreMetadata.dll
  • Cake.CoreMetadata.xml

5. Enabling IntelliSense in VS Code

Having our metadata libraries prepared now we can adjust our build scripts to have code completion in VS Code. Here are the steps:

  • Add project.json file with empty JSON object into your build directory.
  • Change extension of all your build scripts to csx.
  • Copy metadata libraries into your Build directory.
  • Create imports.csx file. This is the file which contains all original namespace imports. It may look as follows
  • Create metadataimports.csx file. This is the file which contains metadata namespaces imports and loads Cake and metadata references. Each original Cake alias class has corresponding metadata class with Metadata suffix, for instance
    Cake.Common.ArgumentAliases -> Cake.Common.ArgumentAliasesMetadata
    Cake.Common.EnvironmentAliases -> Cake.Common.EnvironmentAliasesMetadata
  • Load imports.csx to your build.csx file via
  • Run VS Code install ms-vscode.csharp 1.7.0, open Build directory and write your build script with IntelliSense support
  • Before running the script remember to comment out from imports.csx file
  • Run the build

I do realize this is quite convoluted explanation so in case of any troubles take a look at my build

6. Known issues

  • Cake.Intellisense can only generate metadata libraries for a standard .NET frameworks, it will fail if you try to create metadata targeting .NETStandard or .NET Core framework
  • Due to some breaking changes in Omnisharp-Roslyn scripting support, IntelliSense will only work with Omnisharp 1.7.0

7. Summary

This approach is just a temporary solution. As you can see, it requires significant amount of work to have a code completion in VS Code. I believe that once Omnisharp-Roslyn has proper plugin support it should be possible to write some kind of custom IntelliSense provider for Cake scripts. There are already people who forked Omnisharp-Roslyn and play around with that, so we just have to wait for something better than this solution.

VS Code – forcing partial IntelliSense support for Cake scripts

One thought on “VS Code – forcing partial IntelliSense support for Cake scripts

  1. Great article!

    We are currently working on a official plugin for OmniSharp. Work is currently happening in my personal omnisharp-roslyn fork, which you’ve linked to in this article, but will move to https://github.com/cake-build/cake-omnisharp once OmniSharp team publish NuGet packages.

    We are also keeping a dialogue with the OmniSharp team to sort out the existing issues with plugin support. In fact, the whole plugin support was initiated by the Cake community member, Richard Simpson.

    Currently, we do not have any timeframe for when this Cake Plugin will be ready. If you are interested and want to know more, you are welcome to chat with us on Gitter (https://gitter.im/cake-build/cake).

    Br,
    Martin, member of the Cake Team

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