The Microsoft.NET.Sdk.WindowsDesktop is not built in source-build or any non-windows builds. However, it is redisted in MSFT builds (via package), and we end up with the N-1 version in the SDK layout. This usually doesn't make a functional difference because it has no internal reference to the live windowsdesktop shared framework versions. It does mean that it might be missing functionality though. The good news is that the targets and props files change very sparingly. There is also the PresentationBuildTasks msbuild task dll, which does change more often, but not constantly.

We need to get a live version of the SDK into non-windows builds. To do so, we will need to build both windowsdesktop as well as winforms, at least partially.

• Winforms -- very rough linux build
  • The only assets that come out of winforms and are required are in the Microsoft.Private.Winforms package, and are the targets + props files in pkg\Microsoft.Private.Winforms\sdk\dotnet-wpf.
  • The repo does not build cleanly on Linux. This is because it invokes msbuild.exe to build some specialized test assets. In theory, we could build the whole repo, just excluding some test projects, but it does seem like overkill
  • On the other hand, hacking up the Microsoft.Private.Winforms package build to only include the wpf assets seems like a bad idea too.
  • I lean towards splitting out the SDK assets into a separate private package, then enabling only that on Linux/Mac.
• WPF -- very rough linux build
  • WPF needs two projects to produce the package properly. PresentationBuildTasks.csproj, and the Microsoft.NET.Sdk.WindowsDesktop.ArchNeutral.csproj project.
  • I think it should be possible to just build those two projects to obtain the SDK.
  • The WPF infra is a minefield. There are a few bits and pieces that would need to be worked around to make it possible to build on non-Windows. Building the whole repo is probably impossible.
• WindowsDesktop
  • This is the traditional path that WPF/winforms use to flow into SDK winforms->wpf->windowsdesktop. It's not needed to get the windowsdesktop SDK into the sdk layout. I think we should avoid building this altogether, and instead change the dependency structure so that the VMR's sdk.proj depends on both wpf.proj and windowdesktop.proj, with windowsdesktop.proj excluded in non-windows builds.

It may be possible to eliminate the source-build non-source-build difference here too, depending on what prebuilts, if any, building the subset of winforms and wpf brings in.