I started investigating this for a unit test. I wanted to compile a separate project, and then copy the output into the test directory. As it happens, by the time I’d figured this out in Roslyn, I’d worked out it probably wasn’t right for the test that I was writing; however, given the amount of effort involved in actually piecing together the tiny amount of documentation available, I definitely thought it was worthy of documenting.
This particular post will focus on reading code files and compiling them into an executable or library. I may play around with this some more in the future: I suspect this might have quite a lot of mileage in the unit test space.
Dependencies
Let’s start with the dependencies:
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp" Version="3.11.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform" Version="3.6.0" />
It’s worth bearing in mind that there are a few other libraries knocking about from previous incarnations of Roslyn, and similar tools; however, it’s my understanding that these are not in the Microsoft namespace. I probably spent the first couple of hours trying to get this to work with CSharpCodeProvider. If you found your way here searching for this error:
System.PlatformNotSupportedException: ‘Operation is not supported on this platform.’
Then you’re in good company.
Code
The following code will produce a library called qwerty.dll; it requires a variable giving the sourceFilesLocation and another, destinationLocation:
// 1
DirectoryInfo d = new DirectoryInfo(sourceFilesLocation);
string[] sourceFiles = d.EnumerateFiles("\*.cs", SearchOption.AllDirectories)
.Select(a => a.FullName).ToArray();
// 2
List<SyntaxTree> trees = new List<SyntaxTree>();
foreach (string file in sourceFiles)
{
string code = File.ReadAllText(file);
SyntaxTree tree = CSharpSyntaxTree.ParseText(code);
trees.Add(tree);
}
// 3
MetadataReference mscorlib =
MetadataReference.CreateFromFile(typeof(object).Assembly.Location);
MetadataReference codeAnalysis =
MetadataReference.CreateFromFile(typeof(SyntaxTree).Assembly.Location);
MetadataReference csharpCodeAnalysis =
MetadataReference.CreateFromFile(typeof(CSharpSyntaxTree).Assembly.Location);
MetadataReference[] references = { mscorlib, codeAnalysis, csharpCodeAnalysis };
// 4
var compilation = CSharpCompilation.Create("qwerty.dll",
trees,
references,
new CSharpCompilationOptions(OutputKind.DynamicallyLinkedLibrary));
var result = compilation.Emit(Path.Combine(destinationLocation, "qwerty.dll"));
Let’s break the code down (you may notice that there are 4 comments, that to the untrained eye, appear useless).
1. The first part scans the source files directory and returns a list of files.
2. We then build a **syntax tree** list by reading all the files and calling the **ParseText** method on each; they are added to a list of parsed files.
3. We now build up a list of references needed to compile the code.
4. Finally, we create the dll, passing in the files that we built up in 2 & 3. **.Create** creates an in-memory version of the dll, so we then need to call **.Emit** to write it to disk.Summary and caveats
This is a very simplistic example - as I’ve said, I need to spend some more time looking at some of the more advanced cases, but if you have a very simple library, this will compile and produce the DLL for you.
References
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54364785/c-sharp-compile-c-sharp-code-at-runtime-with-roslyn
https://blog.dangl.me/archive/integration-testing-in-memory-compiled-code-with-roslyn/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/roslyn-sdk/get-started/syntax-transformation