Debug protocol extension: 'icon' attributes on expression evalution results

[gregg-miskelly]

To be able to use the debug protocol in other IDEs (Visual Studio, Xamarin Studio) or VS Code in the future we should think about how the debug protocol should support attributes on an expression to indicate what kind of item a child item is for example:

We have attributes for:

• Is Static
• Is error
• Is property
• Is method
• Is event
• Is class
• Is constant
• Accessibility (private, protected, sealed)

[weinand]

@gregg-miskelly since the VS Code UI is very light on icons, we will probably not introduce icons in the debugger UI. But it makes sense to have this (optional) information available for Variables.

I suggest we introduce an optional attribute 'kind' for this (because you've used 'kind' yourself in the description from above).

[weinand]

@gregg-miskelly @jacdavis could you come up with a list of 'kind' values that we could add to the protocol as recommended values? Those values should be mappable to Xamarin and VS icons.

[jacdavis]

I'll track down the full list as the ui must interpret a bit field of possible values as described here (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb145595.aspx). I'll take a look at how the ui processes these and get back to you.

[jacdavis]

Looking at the source, the icons are a combination of three pieces of information:
The type of item: (Error, Property, Method, Event, Class, Constant, Exception)
The visibility of the item (Public, Private, Protected, Final, and Internal)
The "staticness" of the item: is it static or not.

We also take into account if the item has side effects which doesn't change the icon except we use this for switching between a true property and a property that has side effects (which we show as a method).

I think this implies we either need to expand the list out to account for all cases, or allow for multiple attributes to be exposed. For instance, type=Property Visibility=Public.

[weinand]

@jacdavis thanks for your investigation.
I don't want to add a whole universe of attributes to cover all the dimensions right now. So I'll have to think about this a bit more and I've created a new issue for this.
Since the kind attribute will be available in the June release, debug adapters and frontends are no longer blocked, so I'll close this feature request.