Book Image

Metaprogramming in C#

By : Einar Ingebrigtsen
Book Image

Metaprogramming in C#

By: Einar Ingebrigtsen

Overview of this book

Metaprogramming is an advanced technique that helps developers to automate repetitive tasks, generate scalable code, and enhance productivity in software development. Metaprogramming in C# is a comprehensive guide that will help you reap the full potential of metaprogramming in .NET runtime. You’ll start by learning about the .NET runtime environment and how you can use it to become a more productive developer. You'll learn how to infer types using reflection, use attributes, and create dynamic proxies. You’ll also explore the use of expressions to create and execute code and how to take advantage of Dynamic Language Runtime. But that's not all! You’ll also learn to go beyond inheritance and use method signature conventions to create easily maintainable code. Finally, you’ll dive into the world of compiler magic with Roslyn, where you'll discover how to use Roslyn to generate code, perform static code analysis, and write your own compiler extensions. By the end of this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of metaprogramming concepts and how to apply them to your C# code. You’ll be able to think about types, use attributes and expressions to generate code, and apply crosscutting concerns to improve code quality.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Part 1:Why Metaprogramming?
5
Part 2:Leveraging the Runtime
12
Part 3:Increasing Productivity, Consistency, and Quality
18
Part 4:Compiler Magic Using Roslyn

Practical use case

Let’s build something that leverages the new form of discovery but, more importantly, shows the concept of an elastic growing system that does not require changes at the core for new features to be added.

Let’s revisit the concept of compliance, which is a very common scenario in software. We looked into GDPR in Chapter 4, Reasoning about Types Using Reflection, and Chapter 5, Leveraging Attributes. GDPR is just one type of compliance with which it is important to deal with.

The goal is to create a system in which the core “engine” does not know about the different types of compliance metadata that can exist and instead provides extensibility points, where developers can just add new compliance metadata types as they’re needed.

We want the engine to be generalized and accessible to everyone. Following the GitHub repository mentioned in Technical requirements, you’ll find that there is a Fundamentals project. All...