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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how an existing piece of technology leverages the power of the .NET runtime to make it easier for developers using the technology to do so. From the use of metadata in the right context, we get to focus on delivering business value and don’t have to worry about how it is all configured. It also automatically gives us a certain structure to abide by, which in the long run will yield a more maintainable, extensible, and predictable code base. By adding the action filter as we did, we added what we call a cross-cutting concern, something we will revisit in more detail in Chapter 13, Applying Cross-Cutting Concerns.

In the next chapter, we will dive into how frameworks such as ASP.NET are capable of doing discovery and automation, and how we can leverage the .NET runtime type system to discover types and metadata to achieve something similar.