Add the ability to keep packages in preview

[eerhardt]

When we ship for 8.0 GA, there are going to be some Components that shouldn't be shipped as "stable". For example, https://www.nuget.org/packages/Azure.AI.OpenAI/ does not have a stable version yet. If it doesn't have a stable version before we ship for 8.0 GA, we shouldn't (can't?) ship our Aspire.Azure.AI.OpenAI component as a stable version.

We should have some build infrastructure that allows for specific packages to be built with a preview tag, even when the rest of the packages are "stable".

cc @joperezr @DamianEdwards @sebastienros @radical

[radical]

What would the versions look like? For 8.0 - 8.0.400-preview..? Are there any other repos that ship packages like that - some stable, and some preview?
I'm just wondering if that is accepted way to do it, or if we need to tell the users that it's not a stable package in some other way? (name? build warning?)

[WhitWaldo]

I don't know about packages themselves, but Dapr's .NET SDK currently marks preview APIs with the [Deprecated] attribute, just so they're called out as not yet supported. This issue has them considering switching to the [Experimental] attribute instead though as that's better aligned with the intent.

Even if the packages are marked as not-preview, it might be worth marking the APIs themselves as experimental to call that out.

[eerhardt]

What would the versions look like? For 8.0 - 8.0.400-preview..? Are there any other repos that ship packages like that - some stable, and some preview?

dotnet/runtime does this with <IsShippingAssembly>false</IsShippingAssembly>. This was used in the https://www.nuget.org/packages/System.Numerics.Tensors package until 8.0.0 finally shipped stable. For that package, when the rest of the assemblies shipped stable (7.0.0), it shipped with 7.0.0-rtm.22518.5.

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet also ships some packages as stable and some as not.

I'm not 100% sure how we'd want to handle it.

[DamianEdwards]

I'm pretty sure dotnet/aspnetcore does this today too but not sure if they're using the <IsShippingAssembly>false</IsShippingAssembly> mechanism or something else.

[joperezr]

Yup, essentially we just want to make sure that the DotNetFinalVersionKind property is not set to release if a project is marked with StabilizePackageVersion set to false. Here is how dotnet/runtime does it:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/a2e4177bb55f192483a9f9477a79621338f9c58a/eng/Versions.props#L14-L17

[radical]

Grep'ing a bit - $(StableVersion) might be the relevant arcade property controlling this.

I'm pretty sure dotnet/aspnetcore does this today too but not sure if they're using the <IsShippingAssembly>false</IsShippingAssembly> mechanism or something else.

Can you name any such package? It would help me to check how they might be doing it. My grep-fu fell short in trying to find that in the aspnetcore repo.

[radical]

Yup, essentially we just want to make sure that the DotNetFinalVersionKind property is not set to release if a project is marked with StabilizePackageVersion set to false. Here is how dotnet/runtime does it:

dotnet/runtime@a2e4177/eng/Versions.props#L14-L17

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