Metaprogramming in .NET

Preface

In software development, metaprogramming is one of those words that sounds fancy and sophisticated—and somewhat intimidating at the same time. But what does it mean to be doing metaprogramming? The meta prefix can mean changed or higher. It can also mean after or beside, depending on the context. All of those terms describe the various forms of metaprogramming that we cover in this book.

You may choose to do metaprogramming in order to change code to support a higher level of abstraction within your system or to inject some new behavior that suits your particular needs. You may choose to do these things at compile time, between compile time and deployment, or even at runtime. Because of the flexible nature of the meta prefix, all of ...