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

Virtual members and overrides

From my own experience, generating new types from scratch that didn’t exist at compile time is not the most common use case. I’ve found myself, more often than not, just wanting to automate something that I find tedious and forced upon me from libraries that I have to use.

When that is the case, it is common to take a type and create a new one that inherits from this and then starts overriding behavior.

Since C# doesn’t have all its members as virtual, as the case is with Java, members have to be explicitly virtual. An example of a method that is virtual is one that all objects inherit – the ToString method.

Let’s continue the work on the MyTypeGenerator code by adding an override of the ToString method, just to see the mechanics of how it is done:

  1. In the Generate method of the MyTypeGenerator class, before you return the type, you need to define a new method that will be the MyType implementation of...