What is the purpose of Microsoft.AspNetCore.Razor.Tools?

Question

What is the purpose of Microsoft.AspNetCore.Razor.Tools?

I am using visual studio code on os x

On the git hub page https://github.com/aspnet/RazorTooling I see

Razor syntax provides a quick, accurate, clean, and easy way to combine server code with HTML to create dynamic web content. This repo contains tools that interact with the DNX Design Time Host to enable Razor editing.

Does Visual Studio use the code for this assembly? What is a DNX development time node? When do I need to include this assembly in a project?

I found a link to it in project.json of the web application project that I generated using yo aspnet.

Answer 1

At least here: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNetCore.Razor.Tools/ you can see a brief description of the library:

TagHelper tool for .NET Core CLI. Contains a detailed razor-snap command used to solve TagHelperDescriptors for projects during development.

And here you can find more information: https://docs.asp.net/en/latest/mvc/views/tag-helpers/intro.html#intellisense-support-for-tag-helpers

On mac, you can run the same command:

dotnet razor-tooling

but that makes no sense, because at the moment VS Code does not provide any intensity for Razor views. You can probably remove this dependency from project.json.