Refactor remaining Project and Build files

[Nirmal4G]

Changes

Misc refactors (Follow up of #3894, #3896 and #4068)

• Update variables names and message text.
• Update comments and fix casing, spelling mistakes.
• Rearrange lines for better diff for upcoming patches.

Update Notifications package

• Add ReadMe to Notifications package.
• Add ThirdPartyNotices.txt to the package.
• Place the ReadMe, Icon, License and Notices in the root of the package.

Fixup target UAP versions (non-breaking)

• In both Notifications and XAML Islands Unit Tests projects, We already package them up with lowest UAP version anyway. But the targets don't represent that. So, Fix the project and fallback targets with lowest compatible version instead of latest version.

Update ~OutputPath properties in projects

• Use Base~ output paths where possible.
• Use Count() item function where possible.
• Add missing OutputPath property to WAP projects.

PR Type

What kind of change does this PR introduce?

• Code style update (formatting only)
• Refactoring (no functional changes, no API changes)
• Build or CI related changes (non-breaking)

PR Checklist

Please check if your PR fulfills the following requirements:

• Created a separate branch (other than main/master) in your fork
• Based off latest main branch of toolkit
• Pull Request doesn't include merge commits
• Header has been added to all new source files
• Contains NO breaking changes
• Code follows all style conventions

Other information

• Please Rebase merge if possible.
• Please update the default message option to Default to pull request title and description in the Repository Pull Request settings to have a better commit message instead of Merge pull request #xxxx from repo/branch generic message.

[ghost]

Thanks Nirmal4G for opening a Pull Request! The reviewers will test the PR and highlight if there is any conflict or changes required. If the PR is approved we will proceed to merge the pull request 🙌

[michael-hawker]

@Nirmal4G there's a whole bunch of different types of changes here, some seem functional with respect to the targets of the Notifications.

There's not much more value in fixing comments in project files or re-organizing them. If there are things which can be removed because they're in common files great, but lets do that as a separate PR. Same if there are fixes that should be done for the notifications or something (though I don't think we've seen any issues at the moment).

[Nirmal4G]

@michael-hawker

I'm isolating the changes from #4181 that are not related to CPVM feature to figure out why some tests are failing there.

I can open a separate PR if that's what you want but... The notifications change is NOT breaking or intrusive or even a public change.

So, Can you please reopen this?

[michael-hawker]

The main thing that I was worried about for the Notifications was the changes to the versioning in the paths as I don't know how that effects the final package output.

[Nirmal4G]

@michael-hawker Don't worry, it doesn't affect the packaging. I assure you; this PR doesn't contain any breaking change!

[michael-hawker]

@Nirmal4G I've re-opened so you can re-run the CI. Just want to be weary still of the more nitpicky updates to project files to reduce churn for little value, as we have discussed previously.

[Nirmal4G]

Sure, I have reduced unnecessary changes. These changes do flow through the next PR.

I have a separate branch like winui for both UWP Toolkit and Desktop Toolkit repos that contains my final patches. Occasionally, I compare them and create necessary patches for upstream. I'll only create patches that I think would be beneficial.

For example, when you want to update the Notification project for newer UAP target, You'd have to update multiple places but now I've made it so that when you update the target version in the common props will update everywhere.

For the code style update for MVVM source generators project file, I followed what I had done in previous PR. I'm still working on the automation of code style analysis but in the meantime, I'll update the new files when possible.

[michael-hawker]

Thanks @Nirmal4G! We're just wrapping up the 7.1 release this week; so it'll take us a little bit to get to this one. I've flagged it for the next milestone for tracking.

[Nirmal4G]

@michael-hawker I guess it's okay but this patch only contains non-functional changes. It also does not modify build outputs. That's also one of the reasons why I separated this from the CPVM patch tree, so that we can merge this in sooner than latter.

If possible, I would like to merge this in along with the media controls' DesignTools update for the 7.1 release. But even I understand it'll be a stretch!

I'll be opening a PR soon for that, hopefully by tomorrow.

[michael-hawker]

Yeah, we're just in a state now where we're touching as little as possible. Will be easier to get this reviewed after release and in to bake while we're working on the next milestone. Just don't want to accidently introduce an issue if we happen to overlook something this close to release when it's even tangentially related to the build/project structure.

[Sergio0694]

Could you please undo all changes affecting the .NET projects? We've paused work there until the split as we don't want PRs to get stuck during the transition. We'll be doing the split soon and this means that we'd either have to rush merging this before then (which I don't want, also because there are a number of changes here I wouldn't approve), or you'd end up with a PR trying to modify a whole lot of files that would then be completely gone from this repository, leaving you with a ton of conflicts.

Let's just keep this isolated to stuff that will remain here (ie. all the UWP stuff) and let's eventually look into this again in the future once the new repository is live. Also FYI, you might want to discuss the changes you'd like to do before actually doing the work to open a PR, otherwise you might end up just wasting time for something that won't be merged anyway. For instance, I don't want any of those file renames/moves you've been doing to the .NET projects (eg. the files ported from the runtime).

Thanks! 🙂

[Nirmal4G]

...there are a number of changes here I wouldn't approve...

These are all non-functional changes. Most of them are removals of redundant code. You can check the summary of individual commits on why the changes been made.

As I mentioned before, they are leftovers from previous refactor PRs. Since I was trying to make them diffable with comments (on changes), I had to separate them from those previous PRs.

[Nirmal4G]

…I don't want any of those file renames/moves you've been doing to the .NET projects…

Is there any reason why you don't want these files in a predictable location?

[michael-hawker]

@Nirmal4G really appreciate your enthusiasm, still deciding if we'll have another 7.1.x hotfix, and I'd want this to come in after we do that and start the next cycle, which we've been pushing back a bit. We may still merge #4395 before this though.

[Nirmal4G]

This is finally done. It took a while after #4395 since I had to separate my local repo to match the remote. A lot of my patches lead to lot of conflicts for these kinds of changes!!