sdk: Useless and incorrect message if a tool does not have "emitEntryPoint": true

Steps to reproduce

Create a tool but don’t put "emitEntryPoint": true in the project json. Try to use the tool from a different project

Expected behavior

Either a warning/error during compilation or a helpful error when trying to run the tool

Actual behavior

PS C:\Users\XXXX\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\dotnet-scratch> dotnet list-tools
Expect required library hostpolicy.dll to be present in [C:\Users\XXXX\.nuget\packages\.tools\dotnet-list-tools\1.0.0-t2016050317041\netcoreapp1.0]
  - This may be because of an invalid .NET Core FX configuration in the directory.

Note that the error is:

incorrect - I don’t think we ever should expect hostpolicy.dll in ~.nuget\packages.tools subfolder
useless - not really actionable
misspelled (?) - shouldn’t it be Expected required library... instead of Expect required library?

Environment data

dotnet --info output:

.NET Command Line Tools (1.0.0-rc2-002655)

Product Information:
 Version:     1.0.0-rc2-002655
 Commit Sha:  3e96a05f9c

Runtime Environment:
 OS Name:     Windows
 OS Version:  10.0.10586
 OS Platform: Windows
 RID:         win10-x64

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 8 years ago
Reactions: 2
Comments: 21 (8 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@schellap and team,

Interestingly, I see this issue still happening with emitEntryPoint: true however if I do dotnet -v run it works just fine. What is it about the -verbose flag that causes it to run successfully?

chilch on Dec 15, 2016

I am currently experiencing this issue, but I have emitEntryPoint: true in my project.json.

aggieben on Oct 31, 2016

I just tested this for RC2. I see the same issue. Not having previously worked in this area, I would have liked to see a message like “Loaded matching assembly named <assembly_name> from package <package_name> but that assembly does not contain an entry point. This link <fwlink> explains how to properly create a tool.” or some such thing. I.e. Help me identify where the problem is and then tell me the details I need to know to fix it.

lajones on May 9, 2016

tools without entry point are not a thing. We can improve the experience here in two ways:

dotnet.exe should provide a useful message when passed any dll that does not have an entry point
restoring such tools should fail with a useful error

TheRealPiotrP on May 4, 2016

What @piotrpMSFT said. This is about experience - people will make mistakes and if they do they need to be able to understand the error messages enough to be able to fix the mistake.

moozzyk on May 4, 2016