How Can Metaprogramming Benefit You?

So, what is metaprogramming and why should you care? If you picked up this book hoping to learn about programming in the metaverse, you’re about to become very disappointed.

Metaprogramming is all about code treating other code as data. This could be just to understand and reason about the code, or actually create new code based on metadata implicitly through structure or explicitly added.

“But why should I care about that,” you might ask? “Isn’t it just enough to write the code and get it shipped?” In this chapter, we will look into the concrete benefits you can get from doing metaprogramming and how it can benefit you daily. We will also provide tips on how it can increase productivity and remove tedious tasks we developers tend to have to do.

The main objective of this chapter is to introduce you to metaprogramming and examples of use cases. In doing this, we’ll see some of the building blocks .NET has for metaprogramming. In this chapter, we’ll cover the following topics:

• Reasoning about your code
• Removing manual structures and processes

By the end of this chapter, you should have some good ideas and inspiration for how metaprogramming can benefit you. You should have also gained insight into what metaprogramming is all about.