Generate Bare Definitions for a Project or Namespace (Visual Studio) - visual-studio

Question

In developing an SDK for use within our product, we want to provide users (developers) a Visual Studio plugin, mainly to provide them Intellisense during their development and ensure their code compiles for them. To do this, we strip the contents of all of our SDK APIs and put them all in a separate project.
For example:
public IEnumerable<string> AvailableConnections(bool querySystem) {
var connections = ConnectionList();
if(querySystem)
connections = connections.Concat(SystemConnections());
... // Filter connections somehow
return connections;
}
public void WriteToStream(Stream strFrom, Stream strTo) {
byte[] buffer = new byte[32 * 1024]; // 32 KiB
int len;
while ( (len = input.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
{
output.Write(buffer, 0, len);
}
}
Becomes:
public IEnumerable<string> AvailableConnections(bool querySystem) { return null; }
public void WriteToStream(Stream strFrom, Stream strTo) { }
My question: Does a tool exist to automate this, whether for a particular project or particular namespace? Ideally, it would intake a project or namespace and output all of the public classes/functions replacing their definitions with a simple return of the return type's default value. Visual Studio seems to do almost this when you view a class from which you don't have the source (e.g., you'll see IEnumerable<T> [from metadata]).

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to provide interfaces to your API.
You can build this into your project and essentially you will always have an assembly that shows all the public members without containing your implementation code.
Create a project that contains only the API, and reference that from your main project so that your concrete code (your implementation) implements the interfaces.
The API assembly would contain mostly interfaces and perhaps some abstract classes an helper, which you could share with developers.
Taking your example, you would have an interface like
public interface IMySdkThing
{
IEnumerable<string> AvailableConnections(bool querySystem);
void WriteToStream(Stream strFrom, Stream strTo);
}
Your implementation would be declared like:
public class MySdkThing : IMySdkThing
{
// all the code you showed, just as it is
}
All that said, it isn't clear how this will be useful to the developer. He or she will need a dll with some actual, executable code in it to use your library. Intellisense and compile-time checking come for free; you don't have to do anything special.