Structured Storage Reference Implementation

[jeremy-visionaid]

If it's of interest, the current implementation of CFB I'm using is a dotnet wrapper of the Windows Structured Storage APIs:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/stg/structured-storage-start-page

It uses CsWin32 to provide COM interop for the relevant interfaces, so it could be leveraged in unit tests to ensure that the files serialized by OpenMcdf are valid/compliant.

I'm happy to share it, but it would mean that any tests written against it would require a platform specific TFM (e.g. net6.0-windows)

If we also wanted to use that for CI, it would require transitioning to windows-latest instead of ubuntu-latest

[jeremy-visionaid]

@ironfede @Numpsy The reference implementation might also be useful for benchmarking purposes

[Numpsy]

If we also wanted to use that for CI, it would require transitioning to windows-latest instead of ubuntu-latest

fwiw I think it'd be nice for validation purposes if the CI run the tests in multiple platforms rather than just one

[ironfede]

I think that this is really interesting. My only concern (as you've highlighted) @jeremy-visionaid , is that this would make OpenMcdf solution platform-dependent. Is there any solution you can think about it? A separate validation-test repository maybe?

[jeremy-visionaid]

Locally I have a branch with an additional net8.0-windows test project with some extra tests. I think that's fine, it is what it is, just extra tests - but it can obviously only run on Windows.