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

Reasoning about Expressions

So far, we’ve looked at the powerful metadata that is captured and how we can access it using reflection. We’ve also looked at how we can leverage this same metadata and generate code on the fly at runtime.

Using reflection and generating code as techniques in metaprogramming are extremely powerful, but they’re not applicable to all scenarios. It can also be very involved and produce hard-to-read and maybe even hard-to-maintain code going deep with reflection and proxy generation.

C# expressions can, for a lot of scenarios, represent a better approach or an additional approach for specific scenarios for doing runtime discovery and extraction of metadata.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • What are expressions?
  • Traversing an expression tree
  • Using expressions as descriptors of members on types

From this chapter, you should understand what expressions are and how you can leverage them as...