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

Method signature conventions

Coming up with good examples to do a home run on a topic for a book can be very hard. For this chapter, I’ve decided to go with something that is part of my day-to-day job.

I work with a platform that is centered around event-driven architecture, or more specifically, with event sourcing. This topic might be unfamiliar to you, so let’s dive into what this specifically is, to give you the context.

In traditional CRUD (short for Create, Read, Update, Delete) systems, the primary focus is on the concrete data that is commonly stored in a relational or document database. These systems revolve around the four fundamental operations – creating new records, retrieving existing records, updating records, and deleting records.

The data in such systems represents the outcome of a user’s actions, and the system’s flow typically follows a one-to-one mapping from the user’s input form to the database. However, this...