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

Leveraging library metadata to get project referenced assemblies

If you are going to gather metadata across a running process, chances are that you’re only interested in the assemblies that are part of your solution and not all the .NET framework libraries or third-party libraries. There is a performance impact of looking through all assemblies for metadata, so filtering down might be a good idea.

In .NET projects, we can add package references, typically from sources such as NuGet or your own package sources, but we can also add local project references. These are references to other .csproj files representing something that we want to package in its own assembly. Inside a .csproj file, you can identify the different references by their XML tags – <PackageReference/> or <ProjectReference/>. Inside Visual Studio or Rider, you will typically see these tags in the explorer view as well.

The C# compiler produces additional metadata to distinguish the different...