Metaprogramming in .NET

01/30/2013 · No Responses

Metaprogramming in .NET is designed to help readers understand the basic concepts, advantages and potential pitfalls of metaprogramming. It introduces core concepts in clear, easy-to-follow language and then it takes you on a deep dive into the tools and techniques you’ll use to implement them in your .NET code. You’ll explore plenty of real-world examples that reinforce key concepts. When you finish, you’ll be able to build high-performance, metaprogramming-enabled software with confidence.

When you write programs that create or modify other programs, you are metaprogramming. In .NET, you can use reflection as well as newer concepts like code generation and scriptable software. The emerging Roslyn project exposes the .NET compiler as an interactive API, allowing compile-time code analysis and just-in-time refactoring.

Metaprogramming in .NET is a practical introduction to the use of metaprogramming to improve the performance and maintainability of your code. This book avoids abstract theory and instead teaches you solid practices you’ll find useful immediately. It introduces core concepts like code generation and application composition in clear, easy-to-follow language, and then it takes you on a deep dive into the tools and techniques that will help you implement them in your .NET applications.

Written for readers comfortable with C# and the .NET framework—no prior experience with metaprogramming is required.

What’s Inside

Metaprogramming concepts in plain language
Creating scriptable software
Code generation techniques
The Dynamic Language Runtime

Table of Contents
Part 1: Demystifying metaprogramming
Chapter 1. Metaprogramming concepts
Chapter 2. Exploring code and metadata with reflection

Part 2: Techniques for generating code
Chapter 3. The Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4)
Chapter 4. Generating code with the CodeDOM
Chapter 5. Generating code with Reflection.Emit
Chapter 6. Generating code with expressions
Chapter 7. Generating code with IL rewriting

Part 3: Languages and tools
Chapter 8. The Dynamic Language Runtime
Chapter 9. Languages and tools
Chapter 10. Managing the .NET Compiler

Appendix A. Metaprogramming in Windows 8
Appendix B. Usage guide