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Contributing to DiffViewer

Thanks for your interest in contributing. This is a small, single-maintainer project, but outside contributions are welcome.

Tech stack at a glance

  • .NET 8 targeting net8.0-windows (WPF).
  • AvalonEdit for the diff text editors (left, right, and inline panes).
  • DiffPlex for the line-level and word-level diff algorithm.
  • LibGit2Sharp for reading repository state. Hunk write operations (stage / unstage / revert) shell out to git.exe on PATH via GitWriteService.
  • CommunityToolkit.Mvvm for ObservableObject, [RelayCommand], and [ObservableProperty].
  • xUnit + FluentAssertions for the test project.

Project layout

  • DiffViewer/ — the WPF app.
  • DiffViewer.Tests/ — xUnit unit tests, mostly targeting view-models and services. InternalsVisibleTo is granted to the test project so internal helpers are reachable.

AGENTS.md at the repo root is an agent-facing structured reference that also serves as a quick map of the codebase — read it for the short version of project conventions.

Build, test, run

See the README's "Build from source" section. TL;DR:

dotnet build -c Release
dotnet test
dotnet run --project DiffViewer\DiffViewer.csproj

Please run dotnet test locally before opening a PR. CI (.github/workflows/build.yml) runs the same on every push and PR.

Per-user state on disk

DiffViewer writes settings and recent-context history under %APPDATA%\DiffViewer\:

  • settings.json — persisted UI preferences (font, toggles, suppressed confirmation flags, etc.).
  • recents.json — up to 10 most recent launch contexts.

Corrupt or future-version files are renamed to .bak rather than overwritten; see SettingsService and RecentContextsService for the exact behavior.

Notable csproj knobs

DiffViewer.csproj has one load-bearing publish setting that's easy to remove by accident:

<IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract>true</IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract>

This is what makes LibGit2Sharp's native git2-*.dll work inside the single-file bundle (they get extracted to %TEMP% on first launch). Do not remove without testing on a clean machine.

PR conventions

  • Commit messages: free-form, but be specific. No required prefix.
  • Branching: work directly on master for small, low-risk changes; use a feature branch + PR for anything risky or non-trivial.
  • Run dotnet test before pushing.
  • Keep changes surgical and focused. Don't fold unrelated cleanup into a feature commit.

Releases

Release builds are tag-driven and published via .github/workflows/release.yml. See the README's "Releases" section. Don't fold a release into a normal feature commit — release tags should point at the commit that should ship.

License

By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the MIT License that covers the project.