The Scraper layer is responsible for traversing header files and generating C# files.
The Emitter layer is responsible for traversing the generated C# files and generating Windows.Win32.winmd.
The WinmdGenerator packages the Scraper and Emitter tooling into an MSBuild project SDK that acts as the interface for converting C/C++ projects to winmds for use with language projections.
The Scraper layer is responsible for traversing header files and generating C# files.
ClangSharp traverses header files as defined within Partitions and generates C# files within generated.
The base settings passed into ClangSharp are defined within baseSettings.rsp along with adjacent architecture-specific response files.
Project-specific settings are included within scraper.settings.rsp along with adjacent domain-specific response files like libMappings.rsp, supportedOS.rsp, and WithSetLastError.rsp.
scraper.header.txt includes using statements that are added to the generated C# files to resolve cross-namespace dependencies.
ConstantsScraper walks the header files included within Partitions and generates C# constants based on regular expression pattern matching.
The base settings passed into ConstantsScraper are defined within baseSettings.ConstantsScraper.rsp.
Project-specific settings are included within ConstantsScraper.settings.rsp.
ConstantsScraper.header.txt includes using statements that are added to the generated C# files to resolve cross-namespace dependencies.
The Emitter layer is responsible for traversing the generated C# files and generating Windows.Win32.winmd.
ECMA-335 defines the format of winmd files. ECMA-335 is the binary format used by .NET binaries.
- WinRT winmd files use this format
- Many Win32 concepts already supported from .NET interop
- Reflection-based APIs provide a simple interface for parsing the metadata directly
- Reflection-based APIs provide a simple means to convert winmd to other formats like JSON
The Emitter layer augments ECMA-335 by applying additional patterns and custom attributes that allow language projections to understand Win32-specific semantics and provide an improved developer experience. See PROJECTIONS.md.
This class orchestrates the manipulation and compilation of the generated C# files.
Project-specific settings are included within emitter.settings.rsp.
ClangSharp was designed to create C#-compilable code from Win32 headers. Because its goal is to create C#-compilable code while also preserving pointers, it can't always express things in the way we would like for metadata, which is meant to be language-agnostic. For example, the CLR will not allow managed types such as "interface" or "delegate" to be on an unsafe struct (a struct that gets pointed to or includes pointers). This means ClangSharp emits COM objects as structs instead of interfaces, so that a COM object can exist on an unsafe struct. A .winmd does not have such restrictions, so ClangSharpSourceCompilation handles manipulating the generated CLR-compliant C# files into the language-agnostic metadata representation.
This class moves APIs to namespaces based on requiredNamespacesForNames.rsp.
This class visits each node in the C# abstract syntax trees (AST) and applies modifications such as remaps and custom attributes.
This class handles merging C# files from multiple architectures to identify architecture-specific APIs.
This class walks the final C# abstract syntax trees (AST) and writes each node to Windows.Win32.winmd.
The WinmdGenerator packages the Scraper and Emitter tooling into an MSBuild project SDK that acts as the interface for converting C/C++ projects to winmds for use with language projections.
The WinmdGenerator tooling is published to nuget.org as Microsoft.Windows.WinmdGenerator. As an MSBuild project SDK, it enables a no-code project file based configuration interface for generating winmd files from arbitrary C/C++ projects.
win32metadata and wdkmetadata both demonstrate WinmdGenerator project files. The WinmdGenerator version can be controlled as described here.