Dotnet Source Generators in 2024 Part 1: Getting Started

Introduction

In this blog post, we will cover the basics of a source generator, the major types involved, some common issues you might encounter, how to properly log those issues, and how to fix them.

Source Generators have existed since .NET 5 was first introduced in late 2020. They have seen numerous improvements since that initial release, including the creation of newer Incremental Source Generators.

TLDR: Source generators in .NET enable you to inspect user code and generate additional code on the fly based on that analysis. The example in this blog post may seem a bit redundant, but as you use more advanced patterns, you can generate hundreds of lines of code, helping to reduce boilerplate and repetitive code across your projects. Source generators are also great for lowering runtime reflection use, which can be expensive and slow down your applications.

Skip to the real content.

While developing a C# library to perform messaging between various process components or between processes, I encountered an issue where client programs using this new messaging library would need to add a list of all the “Messenger types.” I had heard of source generators and experimented with them a small amount before encountering this problem, so I figured I could dive in and devise a working solution to handle this and inject the list of “Messenger types” as a property automagically.

I have also been learning various programming paradigms and interesting practices. Vertical Slice architecture and aspect-oriented programming (AOP) are the two relevant to this blog. Vertical slices focus on grouping things that will change together, typically by the feature they represent, regardless of the layer they belong to. The goal of the slices is to minimize coupling between slices and maximize coupling in a slice (i.e., things in a feature depend on each other while trying not to rely on other slice features). This keeps the code base modular and makes it easy to update, remove, or add new slices, as the changes shouldn’t directly affect existing slices. [You can read more on vertical slices here]

AOP is a p

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