In bed with Roslyn

Microsoft have been talking about their “C# compiler as a service” project, aka Roslyn, for a couple of years now, and yesterday the C# team finally released a preview version. Being a bit of a language geek, I was interested to see if I could use Roslyn not only to perform analysis and refactorings but to extend the C# language itself. The reason for wanting to do this is to replace repetitive and error-prone boilerplate code with terser, more expressive code — quicker to write, easier to read and no chance for human error to muck it up.

The motivating example

If you’ve written much WPF or Silverlight code, you’ve undoubtedly written a bunch of dependency properties. Because C# has no built-in support for DPs, this means you have to write a bunch of code spread across several members, something like this:

public static readonly DependencyProperty WidgetudeProperty =

  DependencyProperty.Register("Widgetude", typeof(int), typeof(Widget),

    new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(OnWidgetudeChanged));

 

public int Widgetude

{

  get { return (int)GetValue(WidgetudeProperty); }

  set { SetValue(WidgetudeProperty, value); }

}

 

private static void OnWidgetudeChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)

{

  // on-change logic here

}

This is not only boring to write, it is hard to read because the code is cluttered with boilerplate, and it is prone to error. If I had a dollar for everybody who put business logic in the CLR property setter and then wondered why it wasn’t being run when a binding updated… well, I’d have $3.00. And it’s awful to maintain. For example, if I change the property to a double, I have to update the type in three places. If I change the property name, I have to update it in seven!

Read more: MindScape blog

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