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

Infrastructure

Let’s create a bare foundation of what’s needed for having observers that can respond to events being appended.

Let’s create a folder called Chapter12 at the root of your repository. Change into this folder in your command-line interface and create a new console project:

dotnet new console

You’re going to make use of the Microsoft hosting model to get the .NET default service provider without spinning up a web application. To achieve this, you’ll need the package called Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting. In the terminal, you’d add the reference by doing the following:

dotnet add package Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting

The next thing you’ll need to do is to reference the Fundamentals project. In the terminal, do the following:

dotnet add reference ../Fundamentals/Fundamentals.csproj

As I discussed in Chapter 4, Reasoning about Types Using Reflection, one of the things I do in all my code is to formalize types...