dotnet CLI: Enhancements Epic

[MiYanni]

Core Tenants

Note

We'll use t-shirt sizes (S, M, L) to gauge the amount of effort and impact.
A ? means an unknown amount of effort/impact.

Consistency

• Surface (Schema/Format) Standards
  • Effort: L, Impact: L
  • Design standards and rules around CLI command surface
  • Refactor current CLI surface to meet those standards
    • Potential for breaking changes but aliases will be used to minimize impact
  • Implement deprecation mechanism
  • Refactor documentation to present a versioned CLI surface
• Command Implementation (Shared Library)
  • Effort: M, Impact: M
  • Create public-facing (shippable) shared CLI library
  • Enhanced System.CommandLine features
    • All types require dotnet CLI specific implementations (eq. System.CommandLine.Option would have Microsoft.DotNet.Cli.Option [exact names TBD])
    • Custom help system
    • Additional features not present within S.CL (eg. option sets, argument ordering, etc.)
  • Shared command-specific options/arguments (or anything else that is reusable within the dotnet CLI domain)
• Command Output (Output Stream Handling)
  • Effort: M, Impact: S/M
  • Review current command output and determine how to normalize
    • This has potential for "breaking changes" if users relied on commands outputting in a certain way
  • Refactor commands to use shared output schema (eg. allow for machine-readable formats, "--what-if" operational logic, etc.)
  • Shared color handling
  • Better use and implementation of resource strings
• Telemetry
  • Effort: S, Impact: M
  • Review current telemetry schema
  • Update telemetry to better suit customer needs/usage
  • (Potential) Use different telemetry provider (for performance reasons)

Performance

• Effort: M, Impact: M/?
• Investigate general operational performance (eg. command-independent perf)
• Investigate command-specific performance
• Investigate AOT designs (or other potential start-up perf improvements)
• Investigate OOP (out-of-proc) designs
• Investigate cross-plat performance

AI

• Effort: ?, Impact: ?
• Review commands for potential AI interaction (eg. dotnet new would allow creation based on AI interaction instead of traditional explicit templates)
• Determine how authentication would work with AI commands
• Determine if any local LLMs could be useful/created for the dotnet CLI and related concepts (eg. MSBuild, NuGet, etc.)

New Features

• Effort: ?, Impact: ?
• Command input/prompting design (eg. interactive command usage)
• Shared configuration (eg. global.json replacement specific to dotnet CLI)
  • Could be repo-specific, SDK-version specific, or global (?)
• SDK/runtime installation management

[marcpopMSFT]

The AOT performance work is big enough to be tracked separately under #49667

For now, we'll focus this one on CLI consistency and LLM enhancements initially