A plugin project references exactly one package, Dverse.Sdk. It carries the attributes, the source generators and the MSBuild targets. Nothing else is needed at runtime: the context API is generated into your assembly as internal source, and the attribute applications are stripped from the IL by [Conditional], so they contribute nothing to what ships.

The generators are pure — no network, no filesystem beyond the committed dataverse.snapshot.json. That is what makes builds reproducible and lets CI compile a plugin project with no Dataverse connection at all.

Two artifacts come out of a build: the assembly, and a registration manifest beside it. They are diffed independently — which is why changing a step's rank never re-uploads the DLL, and why a no-op deploy performs no writes.

Conventions on these pages

Nullable signatures are the real ones. A ? means the property is genuinely optional and has a documented default.
Diagnostic ids are load-bearing. Where a rule is mentioned — DVERSE021, say — it is the exact error the compiler raises.
Defaults are the platform's unless stated otherwise, so a rank of 1 here means the same thing it means in the Plugin Registration Tool.