Skip to main content

.NET 5–Source generators–Lessons learned - Part 1

One of the new features in .NET 5 that triggered my curiosity where source generators. I did some investigation on how to use them and want to share the lessons I learned along the way.

But let’s first start with an explanation what “a source generator” actually is:

A Source Generator is a new kind of component that C# developers can write that lets you do two major things:

  1. Retrieve a Compilation object that represents all user code that is being compiled. This object can be inspected and you can write code that works with the syntax and semantic models for the code being compiled, just like with analyzers today.
  2. Generate C# source files that can be added to a Compilation object during the course of compilation. In other words, you can provide additional source code as input to a compilation while the code is being compiled.

So in short, source generators are a new compiler feature that allow you to inspect existing code and generate new code(remark: you cannot change existing code).

I started with the example mentioned in the blog post above:

But when I build my project, nothing happened and it looked like no code was generated. What was I doing wrong?

How to debug a source generator?

So the first question became how can I debug a source generator? Now I had no clue how to investigate what was (not) happening.

The trick is to add a `Debugger.Launch()` statement inside your code:

Now when you build your code a popup should appear that asks you how you what debugger you want to launch.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

.NET 8–Keyed/Named Services

A feature that a lot of IoC container libraries support but that was missing in the default DI container provided by Microsoft is the support for Keyed or Named Services. This feature allows you to register the same type multiple times using different names, allowing you to resolve a specific instance based on the circumstances. Although there is some controversy if supporting this feature is a good idea or not, it certainly can be handy. To support this feature a new interface IKeyedServiceProvider got introduced in .NET 8 providing 2 new methods on our ServiceProvider instance: object? GetKeyedService(Type serviceType, object? serviceKey); object GetRequiredKeyedService(Type serviceType, object? serviceKey); To use it, we need to register our service using one of the new extension methods: Resolving the service can be done either through the FromKeyedServices attribute: or by injecting the IKeyedServiceProvider interface and calling the GetRequiredKeyedServic...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...
Read more