[BinFmt] Identify usages of GenerateResource task

[JanKrivanek]

Background

#6215
This subitem is focused on GenerateResource task
Here we dont need to know exact usages - just gain some idea about magnitude and patterns of usage
GenerateResouce Task uses BinaryFormatter for application/x-microsoft.net.object.binary.base64 mime type - so we are mainly interested in that one

Expected output

• List of internal repos that use GenerateResource task + some sample usages
• Examples of external GH repos (with recent activity) using GenerateResource task
• Count of external repos using GenerateResource task, idealy categorized by recent usage and # of commits, or some relativelu useful metric giving idea of how much/few it's being used (especialy for Core).

TODO

what about resgen.exe?

[JanKrivanek]

FYI @Forgind - the search might be simplified via simply adding an implicit GenerateResourceWarnOnBinaryFormatterUse parameter with true value (somewhere into common targets? the FullFW version of MSBuild should be likely skipped)

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

I'm using the GenerateResource task in a few projects, via the StronglyTypedClassName etc. metadata on EmbeddedResource items. These EmbeddedResource items are defined in shared projects (*.shproj, *.projitems), and C# source is generated in each consuming project. I don't remember exactly why I did it this way -- perhaps there was some problem with Visual Studio not updating *.projitems correctly if the C# file was generated at design time.

In these *.resx files, all resources are strings only, but some of them read files at build time via System.Resources.ResXFileRef.

[rainersigwald]

To a first approximation, the set of "repos that use GenerateResource" is the same as the set of "repos that use .NET". Search for .resx files or EmbeddedResource items to find most uses.

Few call GenerateResource directly; generally it's used through common.targets

msbuild/src/Tasks/Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets

Lines 3293 to 3295 in 9604d20

	<Target
	Name="CoreResGen"
	DependsOnTargets="$(CoreResGenDependsOn)">

[JanKrivanek]

Based on offlien discussion with @rainersigwald - GenerateResource task targetting NET actually currently doesn't use BinaryFormatter at all (it just transfers the base64 encoded data, with de-/en-coding just the binary format, but performs no de/serialization of the actual data in the blobs - this happens only during generating .resx files and then during runtime when reading embedded resources - both outside of the scope of msbuild)

[ladipro]

Confirming the findings above. The one direct use of BinaryFormatter is basically an optimization to see if input resources should be read in another AppDomain. Then the task indirectly uses BinaryFormatter when it deserializes input resources and re-serializes them to its output. All of this is ifdefed out in .NET (Core) MSBuild so we're safe for now.

The resource story end-to-end is out of scope, the task is just a conversion tool.