C# How to generate code from code

Question

Is it possible to generate and build some c# code based on the code from the same project. I tried with T4 and Reflection, but there are some assembly locking issues. Is there any other way?

Answer 1

Reflection works fine for me. You can get around assembly locking issues by isolating your build task to a separate AppDomain within VS. When the task completes, any assemblies you need to use for code generation will be unloaded together with the task's AppDomain. See AppDomainIsolatedTask.

Answer 2

You can definitely write your own code generator, all in C# - after all, "code" that's being generated is just a text file you write out.

But what's wrong with T4 templates? They offer a lot of functionality that you don't have to reinvent yet again - why not use it? Can you tell us in more detail what problems you're having with T4?

T4 is really just a bunch of classes in .NET, too - so you could definitely write your own code generator handling some of the logic, and use T4 to do the templating & replacing those template values part. But again: in order to help you diagnose your T4 problems, we'd need to know more about those....