Pre-Building Generated Types

[Leh2]

Hi

We are in the process of using dotnet run -- codegen write to prebuild types instead of adding them to the source code. Because our services has external dependencies like RabbitMq and Kafka it isn't possible to start the application in our CI environment. To fix this we need to add an enviroment variable like IsCli and use it to early out the registration of external services in the Startup file:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    services.AddMarten<DatabaseConfig>();

    if (_configuration.IsCli()) return;

    // Register service bus
    // Register kafka
}

This is not optimal so are there any other good solutions to tackle this?

Marten could expose a method like GenerateTypes(..) that we could call during startup, that way we could delay our successful health checks to after runtime generation has finished. The problem with runtime generation today, is that it is too expensive to use in our production environment, and we have no way of knowing when everything has finished generating. The last option we could think of, is if the cli could use build time source generation instead of the current runtime compilation. This would make it much easier to execute during the build process, since it would not rely on the applications ability to actually start up, however this is properly no easy task.