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What tsbindgen Generates

tsbindgen reflects CLR metadata and emits TypeScript declaration packages.

Typical flow

CLR assemblies / shared frameworks
  -> reflection
  -> TypeScript declarations and binding metadata
  -> publishable npm packages

Output repos

Current generated repos include:

  • dotnet
  • aspnetcore
  • microsoft-extensions
  • efcore
  • efcore-sqlite
  • efcore-sqlserver
  • efcore-npgsql

Package shape

Generated packages expose CLR namespaces as importable TypeScript modules. For example:

import { Console } from "@tsonic/dotnet/System.js";
import { WebApplication } from "@tsonic/aspnetcore/Microsoft.AspNetCore.Builder.js";

Typical output structure looks like:

output/
  System.d.ts
  System.js
  System/
    bindings.json
    internal/index.d.ts

That gives Tsonic both:

  • a public TypeScript import surface
  • binding metadata required for CLR-aware compilation

What the metadata is for

The public .d.ts files are only part of the story.

The generated metadata is what lets the compiler reason about CLR-specific concepts such as:

  • overload families
  • extension methods
  • nullable/reference semantics
  • generic constraints
  • broad CLR object positions represented as unknown
  • namespace/module ownership

How generated repos are meant to be consumed

Generated repos such as aspnetcore and efcore* are not documented like first-party source packages. The important user-facing questions are:

  • which CLR dependency to add
  • which npm binding package to install
  • which namespace module to import
  • what a minimal working example looks like

Example: ASP.NET Core

tsonic add framework Microsoft.AspNetCore.App @tsonic/aspnetcore
tsonic restore

import { WebApplication } from "@tsonic/aspnetcore/Microsoft.AspNetCore.Builder.js";

Example: EF Core + SQLite

tsonic add nuget Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite 10.0.0
tsonic add npm @tsonic/efcore
tsonic add npm @tsonic/efcore-sqlite
tsonic restore

import { DbContext } from "@tsonic/efcore/Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.js";
import { SqliteDbContextOptionsBuilderExtensions } from "@tsonic/efcore-sqlite/Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.js";

What it does not generate

The stack does not treat tsbindgen as the source generator for:

  • @tsonic/js
  • @tsonic/nodejs
  • @tsonic/express

Those are first-party TypeScript source packages with their own tsonic.package.json manifests.