Automate Multilingual App Toolkit Building

[gbakeman]

Ref #81

Problem

The build workflow currently doesn't use the MAT for compiling language files, which means that errors in those files won't be caught. In addition, language modifications aren't processed and won't appear in further builds until the project is compiled on a developer's environment.

Adding it to the build workflow has proven to be tricky: the 2022 edition of the extension requires an administrator's approval of a UAC prompt to continue. The GitHub-hosted runner runs commands under a pseudo-administrator account which seems to be causing the install process to halt and require acknowledgement of the UAC prompt. I can't find any combination of switches in the VSIXInstaller to make this work in the build environment. I have a VS Developer Community issue open hoping to mitigate this. I also have requested that GitHub add the extension to the runner images.

Update: It appears that the extension does end up installing, but it takes about 20 minutes to do so. May need to investigate this or find an alternative solution.

In the meantime, I attempted to setup an Azure free tier VM, but ended up using the wrong image and finding out that it was incompatible with the toolkit extension (Windows Server Core does not have UI components and other libraries necessary to install Visual Studio, which is required by the MAT.) Azure still remains an option but required a lot of effort to get off the ground last time.

I'm still making tweaks to the build workflow to make sure I understand what exactly the issue is (also proving to be difficult),

• Find some way to elevate permissions of the runner process (like How to give extra privileges to the runner over the self-hosted Windows server? actions/runner#408, although the suggestion solution doesn't seem to work in the current environment)
  • Not actually the issue
• Find a fix for the long extension installation issue
• Attempt to install the VS2017+ edition of the extension, which may not require admin rights (needs verification)
  • Likely not going to work, but may be worth testing if only to speed up the installation.
• Setup another Azure build environment with the correct image (last ditch effort)

References

• How to run a GitHub Enterprise action runner as an administrator to allow scripts to run with elevated privileges?
  • Links to How to give extra privileges to the runner over the self-hosted Windows server? actions/runner#408, which doesn't seem to apply to the current runner image (service doesn't exist?)
• Can I specify a user account for a GitHub action step on a Windows runner?
• Running a command as Administrator using PowerShell?

[gbakeman]

For some reason, installing the MAT is taking an incredibly long time compared to installing on my system. Total workflow time is about ~22 minutes. Should consider making language compilation a rare event.

[gbakeman]

For considering an alternate build strategy: https://github.com/dotnet/xliff-tasks