A roslyn source generator targeting the Tmds.DBus.Protocol API

This source generator completely eliminates the usage of reflection in order to be trimmer- and AOT-friendly. For further documentation of Tmds.DBus and DBus in general, see https://github.com/tmds/Tmds.DBus#readme.

This Source Generator targets the Tmds.DBus.Protocol API, which means you have to explicitly install said package.

Either install the NuGet package Tmds.DBus.SourceGenerator or clone the git repository and add a project reference to the source generator in your .csproj

<ItemGroup>
    <ProjectReference Include="./Tmds.DBus.SourceGenerator/Tmds.DBus.SourceGenerator/Tmds.DBus.SourceGenerator.csproj" OutputItemType="Analyzer" ReferenceOutputAssembly="false" />
</ItemGroup>

<Import Project="./Tmds.DBus.SourceGenerator/Tmds.DBus.SourceGenerator/Tmds.DBus.SourceGenerator.props" />

Then add the xml definitions as AdditionalFiles to your project. Depending on whether you want to generate a Proxy or a handler, set the DBusGeneratorMode to either Proxy or Handler, respectively.

<ItemGroup>
    <AdditionalFiles Include="DBusXml/DBus.xml" DBusGeneratorMode="Proxy" />
    <AdditionalFiles Include="DBusXml/StatusNotifierItem.xml" DBusGeneratorMode="Handler" />
</ItemGroup>

Now you can instantiate the generated proxy class and use it like with the traditional Tmds.DBus. For handlers, create a new class and inherit from the generated one and implement its abstract methods.

For examples, you may take a look at some projects that use this source generator:

• Avalonia
• DBus.Services.Secrets

DBus interface definitions are written in XML. There are mainly 2 ways for obtaining those:

1. Finding the the source online somewhere... This could be a GitHub repo or some obscure website from the mid 2000s (at your own risk).
2. Dumping the definition via introspection If you have a service running on your system from which you want to extract the definition, you may use busctl, e.g.:
   To list available services:

   busctl list
   

   To inspect the object tree of a service:

   busctl tree <service name>
   

   To dump the xml definition of the interface:

   busctl introspect <service name> /path/to/object --xml-interface